“The six special favors I have to ask are these: first, that you will reconcile me entirely with the Church, that I may be pardoned for my arrest of Pope Boniface VIII.; second, that you will give me and all my supporters the communion; third, that you will grant me tithes of the clergy for five years, to meet the expenses of the war in Flanders; fourth, that you will destroy the memory of Boniface VIII.; fifth, that you will confer the dignity of cardinal upon Messrs. Jacobo, Piero, and others of my friends. The sixth favor I reserve for the proper time and place: it is a great and secret thing.”
The archbishop, having taken the most solemn oaths to grant these requests, ascended, by the intrigues of the king, the papal throne, with the title of Clement V. He became as obsequiously the servant of the King of France as any slave is submissive to his master. The king and his pope joined hands to oppress and rob the world.
“His Holiness Clement V. was, therefore, the thrall and servant of Philip le Bel. No office was too lowly or sacrifice too large for the grateful pontiff: he became, in fact, a citizen of France, and a subject of the crown. He delivered over the clergy to the relentless hands of the king. He gave him tithes of all their livings. As the Count of Flanders owed money to Philip which he had no means of paying, the generosity of the pope came to the rescue; and he gave tithes of the Flemish clergy to the bankrupt count, in order to enable him to pay his debt to the exacting monarch. The pope didnot reduce his own demands in consideration of the subsidies given to those powers: he completed, indeed, the ruin the royal tax-gatherers began; for he travelled in more than imperial state from end to end of France,and ate bishop and abbot and prior and prebendary out of house and home.”[203]
Christendom, then miserably poor, became impoverished by their exactions. These imperial robbers turned to the Jews, and robbed them mercilessly. The unarmed peasantry could present no resistance to the steel-clad warriors mounted on powerful chargers; which steeds were also caparisoned in coats of mail. These knights, in their impenetrable armor, could plunge upon almost any multitude of the peasantry, and disperse them like sheep when wolves rush into the fold. But it is not always that the battle is to the strong. We can often see in history the indications of God’s retributive providence. There were seasons when these proud knights fell before their despised victims.
In the beginning of the fourteenth century an army of these mailed warriors entered Flanders, hacking and hewing in all directions. The manufacturing citizens at the town of Courtrai secretly dug a blind ditch in the path of the invaders. The impetuous knights, breathing through their cross-barred visors, and goggling through the holes left for their eyes, spurred their horses forward in solid mass, and fell headlong, horse and rider, with their heavy and inextricable weight of armor, into the trap set for them. It was a horrible massacre,—an avalanche of overthrown, struggling horses and human bodies cased in steel.
The momentum of the vast mass was such, that their onward movement could not be checked. The pressure behind forced forward those in the advance, till thousands were plunged into the abyss, writhing, struggling, choking, like vipers in a vase. The infuriated peasants and mechanics on the other side of the ditch, with clubs and every other available weapon, beat out the brains of those who endeavored to escape from themaelstrom of death. This enormous slaughter nearly depopulated France of its lords and princes.
The corruptions which had crept into the secularized Church more and more appalled the more devout both of the clergy and of the laity. True men began to speak loudly against these corruptions, and continued so to speak, notwithstanding all the denunciations of temporal and ecclesiastical power.
The leading cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, appointed by infamous popes and kings, were almost universally irreligious and corrupt men. There were some noble exceptions; but sincere piety was more generally found only with the more humble of the clergy, and with the common people.
In order to raise money, Pope Leo X., early in the sixteenth century, devised the plan of selling indulgences. A regular tariff of prices was fixed for the pardon of all crimes, from murder downwards. If a man wished to commit any outrage, or to indulge in any forbidden wickedness, he could do so at a stipulated price, and receive from the pope a full pardon. These permits, or indulgences as they were called, were peddled all over Europe, and an immense revenue was gathered from them. There was one man, by the name of John Tetzel, a brazen-faced miscreant, who made himself very notorious as a peddler of these indulgences. He traversed Northern France and Germany, engaged in this nefarious traffic.
In a cart gorgeously embellished, and accompanied by a musical band, he would approach some populous town, and tarry somewhere in the suburbs until his emissaries had entered the place and informed the inhabitants of the signal honor which awaited them from the advent of a nuncio from the pope with pardons for sin at his disposal.