THE FIRST JUBILEE.
Almighty God, who has “ordered all things in measure and number and weight” (Wisd. xi. 21), and who teaches us, under the guidance of his church, to observe sacred times and seasons, has brought around again the Holy Year of Jubilee, during which an extraordinary indulgence is granted by the Pope, that sinners being led to repentance, and the just increased in grace, each one can hear it said to himself: “In an acceptable time I have heard thee” (Is. xlix. 8).
We will not touch here upon the nature or doctrine of indulgences, more than to give a definition of our Jubilee, viz., a solemn plenary remission of such temporal punishment as may still be due to divine justice after the guilt of sin has been forgiven, which the Sovereign Pontiff, in the fulness of apostolic power, makes at a stated period to all the faithful, on condition of performing certain specified pious works; empowering confessors to absolve for the nonce in reserved cases and from censures not specially excepted, and to commute all vows not likewise excepted into other salutary matter. Our Holy Father, Pius IX., by an Encyclical Letter dated from S. Peter’s on the vigil of last Christmas, has announced that, the year 1875 completing the cycle of time determined by his predecessors for the recurrence of the Jubilee, he declares it the Holy Year, and sets forth the conditions of the same, with other circumstances of ecclesiastical discipline usual on so rare an occasion of grace.
The origin of the word jubilee itself is uncertain. It is a Hebrew term that first occurs in the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus: “And thou shalt sanctify the fiftieth year, … for it is the year of Jubilee.” Josephus (Antiquit., iii. 11) says that it means liberty, by which his annotators understand that discharge among the Jews from debts and bondage, and restitution to every man of his former property, as commanded by the law. The more common opinion derives it from jobel, a ram’s horn, because the Jubilee year was ushered in by the blasts of the sacred trumpets, made of the horns of the ram. Pope Boniface VIII. is erroneously supposed by many to have instituted the Christian Jubilee; for he only restored what had already existed, and reduced it substantially to its present form; inasmuch as there had been from an early period a custom among Christians of visiting Rome at the turn of every succeeding century, in the hope of obtaining great spiritual favors at the tomb of S. Peter, and perhaps also with the idea of atoning in some measure for the superstitious secular games which during the reign of Augustus the Quindecimviri (a college of priests) announced as having been given once in every century in memory of the foundation of the Eternal City, and which, after consulting the Sibylline books in their care, they prevailed upon the emperor to celebrate again. Mgr. Pompeo Sarnelli, Bishop of Bisceglie in 1692, treats of the secular year of the heathen Romans and the Jubilee of their Christian descendants together, as though one were in some respect a purified outgrowth of the other. He says: “But the Christians, to change profane into sacred things, were accustomed to go every hundredth year to visit the Vatican basilica, and celebrate the memory of Christ, who was born for the redemption of the world; so that the Holy Year was the sanctification of the profane centenary in the lapse of time; but in its spiritual benefits it perfected the effects of the Jubilee kept by the Jews every fiftieth year for temporal advantages” (Lettere Ecclesiast., x. 50). Macri also, in his Hiero-lexicon (1768), says: “We believe that the popes who have always endeavored (when the nature of the thing permitted) to alter the vain observances of the Gentiles into sacred ceremonies for the worship of God, in order to eradicate the superstitious secular year of the Romans, established our Holy Year of Jubilee, and enriched it with indulgences.” Of the connection between our Jubilee and that of the Jews Devoti (Inst. Can., ii. p. 250, note) remarks that their fiftieth year “aliquo modo imago fuit Jubilæi, quem postea Romani Pontifices instituerunt—” was in some wise a figure of that Jubilee which, at a later period, the Roman pontiffs instituted.
Benedetto Gaetani of Anagni (Boniface VIII.) had been elected pope at Naples on Dec. 24, 1294, and was residing in Rome at the close of the century, when he heard towards Christmas that many pilgrims were approaching the city, who came, they said, to gain the indulgence which an ancient tradition taught could be obtained there every hundredth year, at the beginning of a new century. Although search was made in the pontifical archives for some record of a concession of special indulgence at such a period, none was found; but witnesses of established veracity assured the pope that they had heard of this indulgence, and that it was connected with a visit to the tomb of S. Peter.
Brocchi in his Storia del Giubbileo, page 6, mentions among the venerable persons examined before the pope and cardinals one man 107 years old, and another—a noble Savoyard—over 100 years old, who both made deposition that as children they had been brought to Rome by their parents, who had often reminded them not to omit the pilgrimage of the next century, if they should live so long. Two very aged Frenchmen from the Diocese of Beauvais also deposed to having come to Rome on the strength of a like centennial tradition of which they had heard their fathers speak. The chronicler William Ventura of Asti (born in 1250) writes that at the beginning of the year 1300 an immense crowd of pilgrims, coming to Rome from the East and from the West, used to throng about the pope and cry out: “Give us thy blessing before we die; for we have learnt from our elders that all Christians who shall visit on the hundredth year the basilica where rest the bones of the apostles Peter and Paul can obtain absolution of their sins and the remission of any penance that might still be due for them” (apud Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script., xi. 26). Boniface VIII. then called a consistory, and on the advice of the cardinals determined to issue a bull confirming the grant of indulgence, did such really exist; and in any case offering a plenary indulgence to all who, contrite, should confess their sins and visit at least once a day for thirty days—not necessarily consecutive, if Romans; if strangers, only for fifteen days in the same manner—the two basilicas of the holy apostles SS. Peter and Paul during the course of the year 1300. This interesting bull, which is usually cited by its opening words, Antiquorum habet fida relatio, and may be seen in any collection of canon law among the Extravagantes Communes (lib. v. De Pœn. et Rem., c. 1), is short and elegantly condensed—for which reason, perhaps, an old glossarist calls it “epistola satis grossè composite”—and, although written before the revival of Latin letters, compares favorably with the verbose composition of later documents. It was probably drawn up by Sylvester, the papal secretary, who is named as writer of the circular-letter sent in the pope’s name to all bishops and Christian princes to acquaint them with the measure taken, and invite them to exhort the faithful of their dioceses and their loyal subjects to go on the pilgrimage Romeward. The pope published his bull himself on the 22d of February, 1300, being the feast of S. Peter at Antioch, by reading it aloud from a richly-draped ambon erected for the occasion before the high altar in S. Peter’s, which had a very different appearance from the domed and cross-shaped structure that we now admire, as lovers of architectural elegance; for as antiquarians we must regret the venerable building which was a basilica in form as well as in name. When Boniface had finished, he descended, and went up in person to the altar to deposit upon it the bull of indulgence in homage to the Prince of the Apostles, whose successor he was, and not unworthily maintained himself to be. Then returning to his former place, while the cardinals stood with bended head around it and beneath him, he gave his solemn blessing to an immense number of pilgrims, who, filling the church and overflowing into the square in front, reverentially knelt to receive it. Truly, the hearts of the people were with that man, although the hands of princes were against him. A most interesting memorial of this very scene has been preserved to us through sack and fire for nearly six hundred years in the shape of a painting by the celebrated Giotto—a portrait, too, and not a fancy sketch—which is the only portion saved of the beautiful frescos with which he ornamented the loggia built by Boniface at S. John Lateran. It represents the pope in the act of giving his benediction to the people between two cardinals (or, as some critics think, two prelates), one of whom holds a document in his hand—evidently meant for the bull of Jubilee by an artist’s license, to specify more distinctly the circumstance; for it was then actually on the altar—while the other looks down upon the crowd over the hanging cloth on which the Gaetani arms are emblazoned. This specimen of higher art of the XIVth century was for a long time preserved in the cloister of S. John, until a representative of the Gaetani (now ducal) family had it carefully set up against one of the pilasters of the church, and protected with a glass covering, in 1786, where it may still be seen, although it is not often noticed according to its merits.
Our chief authorities for the details of this Jubilee are the pope’s nephew, James Cardinal Stefaneschi; the Chronicler of Asti (generally quoted as Chronicon Astense); and the Florentine merchant and Guelph historian, John Villani, who died of the plague in 1348. All were eye-witnesses.
The cardinal wrote on the Jubilee in prose and verse. His work, De centesimo, seu Jubilæo anno Liber, is published in the Biblioth. Max. Patrum, tom. xxv. He is the earliest writer to use the word jubilee, which is not found in the pope’s bull, but must have been common at the period, for others use it. A sententious specimen of the cardinal deacon’s prose style may be interesting; it contains a good sentiment, and is not bad Latin, although the German Gregorovius, in his History of Rome in the Middle Ages, speaks of “die barbarische Schrift des Jacob Stefaneschi”—“that barbarous opuscule of James Stefaneschi”: “Beatus populus qui scit Jubilationem; infelices vero qui torpore, vel temeritate, dum alterius sibi forsan ævum Jubilæi spondent, neglexerint” (cap. xv.)—“Blessed is the people that profiteth by this season of remission; but unhappy are the slothful and presumptuous ones who, promising themselves another Jubilee, neglect it.” His hexameters, however, are undoubtedly execrable; for instance:
“Discite, centeno detergi crimina Phœbo, (!)
Discite, si latebras scabrosi criminis ora
Depromunt, contrita sinu, dum circulus anni
Gyrat, perque dies quindenos exter, et Urbis
Incola tricenos delubra patentia Patrum
Ætherei Petri, Pauli quoque gentibus almi
Doctoris subeant, ubi congerit urna sepultos.”
Cardinal James of the Title of S. George in Velabro was one of the most distinguished men of Rome; “famous,” as Tiraboschi says (Letterat. Ital., v. 517), “not less for his birth than for his learning.” His mother was an Orsini. He died in 1343.
As soon as the grant of this great indulgence was noised abroad an extraordinarily large number of pilgrims set out from all parts of Italy, from Provence and France, from Spain, Germany, Hungary, and even from England, although not very many from that country, which was then at war. They came of every age, sex, and condition: children led by the hand or carried in the arms, the infirm borne in litters, the knightly and those of more means on horseback, while not a few old people were seen, Anchises-like, supported on the shoulders of their sons. The Chronicle of Parma (quoted by Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, v. p. 549) says that “every day and at all hours there was a sight as of a general army marching in and out by the Claudian Way,” which brought the pilgrims into the city after joining the Flaminian Way at the gate now represented by the Porta del Popolo; and the Chronicler of Asti has to use the words of the Apocalypse to describe the throngs that gathered about the roaring gates. “I went out one day,” he says, and “I saw a great crowd which no man could number.” The whole influx of pilgrims, including men and women, during the year, was computed by the Romans at over two millions; while Villani, who was a careful observer, writes that about thirty thousand people used to enter and leave the city every day, there being at no time less than two hundred thousand within the walls over and above the fixed population. But the pilgrimage was especially one of the poor to the tomb of the Fisherman; and all writers on it have remarked, in noticing the fervent enthusiasm of the common people, the cold reserve and absence of their royal masters. Only the Frenchman Charles Martel, titular King of Hungary, came; it is presumable more to obtain the pope’s good-will in the dispute about the succession to the throne than from piety. The nearest approach to royalty after him was Charles of Valois, who came accompanied by his family and a courtly retinue of five hundred knights, and doubtless hoped to receive the crown of Sicily from Boniface, if he could expel the usurping Aragonese.
So many thousands of pilgrims, citizens and strangers, went day and night to S. Peter’s that not a few were maimed, and some even trampled to death, in the struggling crowd of goers and comers that met at the crossing of the Tiber over the old Ælian bridge leading to the Leonine city. To obviate such disasters in future, the wide bridge was divided lengthwise by a strong wooden railing, thus forming two passages, of which the advancing and returning pilgrims took respectively the one on their right. The poet Dante, who is strongly supposed to have been in Rome for the Jubilee, although there is no proof either in the Divine Comedy or the Vita Nuova that he was, may have written as an eye-witness when he describes this very scene of the passing but not mingling streams of human beings in the well-known lines:
“Come i Roman, per l’esercito molto,
L’anno del giubbileo, su per lo ponte
Hanno a passar la gente modo tolto;
Che dall’ un lato tutti hanno la fronte
Verso’l castello, e vanno a Santo Pietro—
Dall’ altra sponda vanno verso’l monte.”[84]
—Inferno, xviii.
The castle here mentioned is, of course, Sant’ Angelo; and the hill is probably Monte Giordano, in the heart of the city, which, although, from the grading of the surrounding streets, is now only a gentle rise graced by the Gabrielli palace, was a high and strongly-fortified position in the XIVth century. Among all the relics seen by the pilgrims in Rome, the Holy Face of our Lord, or Cloth of Veronica, which is preserved with so much veneration in S. Peter’s, seems to have attracted the most attention. By order of the pope it was solemnly shown to the people on every Friday and on all the principal feasts throughout the year of Jubilee. The great Tuscan has also sung of this, which he possibly saw himself:
“Quale è colui che forse di Croazia
Viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
Che per l’antica fama non si sazia,
Ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra;
Signor mio Gesù Cristo, Dio verace,
Or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?”[85]
—Paradiso, xxxi.
A modern economist might wonder how a famine was to be averted, with such a sudden and numerous addition to the population of the city. The foresight of the energetic pope, whose family also was influential in the very garden of the Campagna, among those hardy laborers of whom Virgil sung, “Quos dives Anagnia pascit,” had early in the year caused an immense supply of grain, oats, meat, fish, wine, and other sorts of provision for man and beast to be collected from every quarter and brought into the city, where it was stored and guarded against the coming of the pilgrims. The provisions were abundant and cheap. The Chronicler of Asti, it is true, complains of the dearness of the hay or fodder for his horse; but as he thought tornesium unum grossum (equal to six cents of our money) too high for his own daily lodging and his horse’s stabling, without bait, we must think either that the means of living in Italy in those days were incredibly low, or that Ventura was very parsimonious. It is the testimony of all the writers on this Jubilee that, except an inundation of the Tiber, which threatened for a few days to cut off the train of supplies for the city, everything was propitious to the comfort and piety of the faithful. The roads through Italy leading to Rome were safe, at least to the pilgrims, to whom a general safe-conduct was given by the various little republics and principalities of the Peninsula; and if the Romans did grow rich off of the strangers, there was good-humor on both sides, and not the slightest collision. Indeed, the Romans (who perhaps gained the Jubilee before the great body of the pilgrims had arrived; at least we know that those out of the northern parts of Europe timed their departure from home so as to avoid the sweltering southern heat) seem to have shown some indifference to the spiritual favors offered; as Gregorovius—who, however, is anti-papal—with a quiet sarcasm says: “They left the pilgrims to pray at the altars, while they marched with flaunting banners against the neighboring city of Toscanella”; and Galletti, in his Roman Mediæval Inscriptions (tom. ii. p. 4), has published a curious old one on this martial event, the original of which is now encased in one of the inside walls of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (this name may have been changed by the present usurpers) on the Capitoline hill, where it was set up under Clement X. in 1673. As it is most interesting for its synchronism with the first Jubilee, and the insight it gives us into the mixed sort of fines imposed by the descendants of the conquerors of the world upon a subjugated people in the middle ages—bags of wheat, a bell, the city gates, eight lusty fellows to dance while their masters piped, and a gentle hint that there was no salt sown—we think it might well appear (doubtless for the first time) in an American periodical. The original being in the abbreviated style of the XIVth century, we have modernized it to make it more intelligible to the reader:
“Mille trecentenis Domini currentibus annis
Papa Bonifacius octavus in orbe vigebat
Tunc Aniballensis Riccardus de Coliseo
Nec non Gentilis Ursina prole creatus
Ambo senatores Romam cum pace regebant
Per quos jam pridem tu Tuscanella fuisti
Ob dirum damnata nefas, tibi dempta potestas
Sumendi regimen est, at data juribus Urbis
Frumenti rubla bis millia ferre coegit
Annua te Roma vel libras solvere mille
Cum Deus attulerit Romanis fertilitatem
Campanam populi, portas deducere Romam
Octo ludentes Romanis mittere ludis—
Majori pœna populi pietate remissa.
Sunt quoque communis servata palatia Romæ
Dummodo certe ruant turresque palatia muri
Si rursus furere tentent fortassis in Urbem
Vel jam prolata nolint decreta tenere
In æde reponatur sacra pro tempore guerræ
Tempore vel caro servanda pecunia prorsus.”
The meaning of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth lines is that, since the Romans have land enough to give them their daily bread, but do not object to any amount of quattrim (coin), if the vanquished should prefer, they may pay once for all a thousand pounds in money, instead of the annual tribute of two thousand sacks of grain—with freight charges to destination; and the last lines signify that a sum is laid up in the chapel to be used to carry on another war if the Tuscanellans should again machinate against the City—as Rome was proudly called—or refuse to fulfil the stipulations.
The pilgrims of the Jubilee generally made a small offering at the altars of the two basilicas, although no alms were required as a condition of gaining the indulgence; and it is particularly from a naïve passage of one of them in his valuable chronicle that Protestants and Voltaireans have taken occasion to deride the Jubilees as mere money-making affairs; and even the Catholic Muratori (Antichità Italiane, tom. iii. part ii. p. 156) carps at the inimitable description of so Romanesque a scene as that of two chatting clerics raking in the oblations of the forestieri; but Cenni, the annotator of this great work of the Modenese historian in the Roman edition of 1755, which we use, aptly remarks here that if writers will look only at the bad side of the many and almost innumerable events that have occurred in this low world of ours, and illogically conclude from a particular to the universal, they will discover that art of putting things whereby what has generally been considered good and laudable will appear thereafter worthy only of censure. The Chronicler of Asti, certainly with no great thought of what people would think five hundred years after he was mouldering in his grave, simply writes of the pilgrims’ donations: “Papa innumerabilem pecuniam ab eisdem recepit, quia die ac nocte duo clerici stabant ad altare sancti Petri, tenentes in eorum manibus rastellos rastellantes pecuniam infinitam.”
Although we believe that the honest Chronicler of Asti deserves credit for taking notes at the Jubilee, yet this very passage, read in connection with the other one about the dearness of his living, shows us that he was one of those pious but penurious souls who, if he had lived in our day, and a gentleman called on him for a subscription, would beg to be permitted to wait until the list got down very low. The Protestant Gregorovius has shown that these exaggerated offerings “were for the most part only small coin, the gift of common pilgrims”; while the Catholic Von Reumont (Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. ii. p. 650) has calculated that this “infinite amount of money” was only after all equal to about two hundred and forty thousand Prussian thalers, which would make no more than one hundred and seventy-five thousand, two hundred dollars. When the pope knew how generous were the offerings of the faithful, he ordered the entire sum to be expended on the two basilicas, in buying property to support the chapter of the one and the monastery attached to the other, and in those thousand and more other expenses which only those who have lived in Rome can understand to be necessary to support the majesty of divine worship within such edifices. Surely, it was better, in any case, that the money of the pilgrims should go for the glory of the saints and the embellishment of God’s temples than be exacted at home by cruel barons and ruthless princes to carry on their petty wars or strengthen their castles.
Mr. Hemans (no friend to our Rome), in his Mediæval Christianity and Sacred Art (vol. i. p. 474), says, after mentioning these “heaps of coins”: “If much of this went into the papal treasury, it is manifest that the expenditure from that source for the charities exercised throughout this holy season must also have been great.” This is a lame statement; because, although on the one hand the large subventions of the pope to the poor pilgrims are certain, on the other there is no proof whatever that any alms they gave went into his “treasury.” The pope, indeed, having at heart the comfort of the strangers and the beauty of the city, put up many new buildings and made other improvements, such as the beautiful Gothic loggia of S. John of Lateran, which the greatest painter of the age was commissioned to decorate with frescos (Papencordt, Rom im Mittelalter, p. 336). It is perhaps from a traditionary knowledge of these architectural propensities of the pope during the Jubilee year, and of his endowments to the basilicas, that so many people have quite erroneously believed the sombre but picturesque old farm-buildings of Castel Giubileo, which crown the green and lonely hill where more than two thousand years ago the Arx of Fidenæ stood a rival to the Capitol of Rome, to be a memorial of, and to get its designation from, this Jubilee of A.D. 1300. Even Sir Wm. Gell (Top. of Rome, p. 552) repeats the old story. But the more careful Nibby (Dintorni di Roma, vol. ii. p. 58) has demonstrated, with the aid of a document in the archives of the Vatican basilica, that the name of this place between the Via Salaria and the Tiber, five miles from Rome, is derived from that of a Roman family which acquired the site (previously called Monte Sant’ Angelo) and built the castle in the XIVth century; and that it did not come into the possession of the chapter of S. Peter until the 16th of December, 1458, when it was bought for the sum of three thousand golden ducats. So much for an instance of jumping at conclusions from a mere similarity of name, put together with something else, which is so common a fault of antiquaries.