A Spring Walk in Provence

by Archibald Marshall

The Revolution created great havoc in the cathedral. The cloisters and chapter-house that stood to the east of it were swept away, and all their treasures and those of the cathedral looted, or else broken up. For some reason the old papal throne was spared, and stands in the choir—a plain chair of white marble, with the lion of St. Mark and the ox of St. Luke carved upon it.

It was John XXII who really fixed upon Avignon as the papal city—Clement V had thought of transferring his seat to Bordeaux—and he soon set about housing himself in a manner worthy of a pope. He bought land, and began to build splendidly, not only a palace for himself, but one for his nephew, who had been presented with the bishopric. It still stands on the north side of the place, a comfortable and roomy house enough, though nothing beside the vast pile upon which it looks. He also built himself splendid country houses, one of them at Châteauneuf, where were the famous papal vineyards, and from which still comes a famous wine.

Experts have pointed out some traces of Pope John's work, as well as of the small palace which he replaced; but the great fortified pile in which these were incorporated dates from the next reign—that of Benedict XII. The necessity there was for building a fortress is rather curious. Pope John had amassed a treasure so vast that his successor had to take exceptional steps to guard it.

"According to Villani—who makes the statement on the authority of his brother, who was the representative at Avignon of the great Florentine banking house of the Bardi, of which they were members—eighteen millions of gold florins were found in the papal treasury at John's death; and gold and silver vessels, crosses, mitres, jewels and precious stones to the value of seven millions more. And this prodigious wealth, adds the historian, was amassed by his industry and sagacity and the system of the reservation of all the collegiate benefices in Christendom on the plea of preventing simony."[17]

Mr. Okey goes into an elaborate and interesting discussion as to the present-day value of this vast sum, and puts "the approximate value of the papal treasure at John's death, according to Villani's statement, at the incredible figure of one hundred million pounds sterling." No wonder the walls of the palace were built to stand!

Benedict XII was the third French Pope, and in spite of remonstrances decided to stay on at Avignon. Indeed, Rome was impossible at this time. Civil strife raged there; and "so neglected and ruinous and overgrown with weeds were the churches, that cattle browsed up to the altars in St. Peter's and the Lateran, and a papal legate offered the marbles of the Coliseum for lime-burning."

Sometimes, in all that welter of crime and piety, squalor and luxury, cruelty and sentiment, of the Middle Ages, there stands out the figure of a man whom we seem to recognize as something nearer to ourselves than most of them. Our religion—even the religion of Catholic countries—is so different in spirit from the religion of those days that it is difficult to account for the actions of one after another of the great churchmen, except under the supposition that they were a set of greedy, bloodthirsty hypocrites, which probably most of them were not. But through it all there were constantly arising men and women who were actuated by much the same ideas as we should recognize as holy and righteous if we contemplated them in a living person. The greatest of these saints, we know, helped to fix the standard of goodness that is generally held today. They were men and women of genius, and we understand them as well as they were understood in their own day or perhaps better.

But it is something a good deal less than genius that brings that sense of recognition in the case of a character like that of Benedict XII. He was a large, red-faced man, who was said by his detractors to love coarse jokes and to drink heavily; but his detractors were the clergy from whom he insisted upon behaviour much more in accordance with modern ideas than with those of his own age, and they could not forgive him. "He was a man," wrote one of them, "hard, obstinate, avaricious; he loved the good overmuch, and hated the bad; he was remiss in granting favours, and negligent in providing for the services of the church; more addicted to unseemly jests than to honest conversation; he was a mighty toper, and 'Bibamus papaliter—let us drink like a pope'—became a proverb of the day."

The indictment contains more than a touch of spite. It is not to be supposed that a man who drank mightily, if he really did so, or laughed at a broad story, would have been thought deserving of much censure in those days, especially by one who felt no incongruity in accusing him of loving the good overmuch or setting his face against nepotism. Those were virtues that were hated in that society, so crooked in its views that it could even brand them openly as faults without fear of reproach.