Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Italy was thus freed from German intervention, but her cities remained torn by the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines; and the iron hand of the French lay as heavily on ‘The Kingdom’ as ever the Hohenstaufen’s despotic sceptre. The Sicilians, restless under the yoke, began to mourn Frederick, who, whatever his sins, had been born and bred in the south, the son of a southern princess; while these French were cruel with the indifferent ferocity of strangers who despised those whom they oppressed.

The Sicilian Vespers

Out of the sullen hatred of the multitude, stirred of a sudden to white heat by the assault of a French soldier on a woman of Palermo, sprang the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, the rebellion and massacre of an Easter Monday night, when more than four thousand of the hated strangers, men, women, and children, were put to death and their bodies flung into an open pit. Charles of Anjou prepared a fitting revenge for this insult to his race, a revenge that he intended to exact to the uttermost farthing, for he had little of his brother’s sense of justice and tender heart; but while he made his preparations a Spanish prince, Peter III of Aragon, came to the rescue of the Sicilians with a large fleet. A fierce war followed, but in spite of defeats, treaties that would have sacrificed her to the interests of kings, and continuous papal threats, Sicily clung staunch to her new ally, gaining at last as a recognized Aragonese possession a triumphant independence of the Angevin kingdom of Naples.

Rome, under a pope who was merely the puppet of Charles of Anjou, had hurled anathemas at Peter III; but his successors of more independent mind envied the Sicilians. It was of little use for Rome to throw off Hohenstaufen chains if she must rivet in their stead those of the French House of Anjou. This was the fear that made her look with cold suspicion on her once well-beloved sons the kings of France, whose relations of the blood-royal were also kings of Naples.

Boniface VIII

In 1294 Pope Boniface VIII, sometimes called ‘the last of the mediaeval Popes’ because any hopes of realizing the world-wide ambitions of a Hildebrand or of an Innocent III died with him, was elected to the Chair of St. Peter. His jubilee, held at Rome in 1300 to celebrate the new century, was of a splendour to dazzle the thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Europe who poured their offerings into his coffers; but its glamour was delusive.

Already he had suffered rebuffs in encounters with the kings of England and France: for, when he published a Bull, Clericis Laicos, that forbade the clergy to pay taxes any longer to a lay ruler, Edward I at once condemned the English Church to outlawry, until from fear of the wholesale robbery of their lands and goods his bishops consented to a compromise that made the Bull a dead letter. Philip IV of France, on his part, was even more violent, for he retaliated by ordering his subjects to send no more contributions to Rome of any kind.

A wiser man than Boniface might have realized from his failures that the growth of nationality was proving too strong for any theories of world-government, whether papal or imperial; but, old and stubborn, he could not set aside his Hildebrandine ideals. When one of his legates, a Frenchman, embarked on a dispute with Philip IV, Boniface told him to meet the King with open defiance, upon which Philip immediately ordered the ecclesiastic’s arrest, and that his archbishop should degrade him from his office. Boniface then fulminated threats of excommunication and deposition, to which the French king replied by an act of open violence.

The agent he chose to inflict this insult was a certain Nogaret, grandson of an Albigensian heretic who had been burned at the stake, and this man joined himself to some of the nobles of the Roman Campagna, who had equally little reverence for the Head of Christendom. Heavily armed, they appeared in the village of Anagni, where Boniface VIII was staying, and demanded to see him. Outside in the street their men-at-arms stood shouting ‘Death to the Pope!’

Boniface could hear them from his audience-chamber, but though he was eighty-six his courage did not fail him. Clad in his full pontifical robes, his cross in one hand, his keys of St. Peter in the other, he received the intruders. Nogaret roughly demanded his abdication. ‘Here is my head! Here is my neck!’ he replied. ‘Betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like Him I will at least die Pope.’ At this one of the Roman nobles struck him across the face with his mailed glove, felling him to the ground, and would have killed him had not Nogaret interfered. It was the Provençal’s mission to intimidate rather than to murder, and while he argued with the Italians a hostile crowd assembled to rescue their Vicar, and the French agents were forced to fly.