1329: The effigy of Pope John XXII, by Antipope Nicholas V

On this date in 1329, as Wikipedia puts it, Antipope Nicholas V “presided at a bizarre ceremony in the Duomo of Pisa, at which a straw puppet representing Pope John XXII and dressed in pontifical robes was formally condemned, degraded, and handed over to the secular arm (to be ‘executed’).”

Despite the show of force, Nicholas V was on his last legs at this moment as antipope.

He’d been elevated to the putative papacy by Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV. In this, Nicholas was a throwback to an old rivalry between popes and emperors compassing both authority within the church, and authority on the Italian peninsula, a conflict which had generated several German-backed antipopes in centuries previous. Though not the last antipope in history, Nicholas has the distinction of being the last imperial antipope.

Louis (or Ludwig) had a pique of long standing with Pope John XXII dating back to John’s unwelcome intervention in his, Louis’s, disputed accession as emperor: back in 1314, a divided imperial electorate had wrought a “double election” of the Wittelsbach Louis and the Habsburg Frederick the Fair, a circumstance that resulted in civil war within the empire.

While officially neutral in the fight, the pontiff exploited the opportunity to claw back ecclesiastical authority by asserting that the imperial throne was vacant and its edicts null until the papacy had blessed the claimant. Louis told John to pound sand.

Certain persons, blinded by avarice and ambition, and totally ignorant of the Scriptures, have distorted the meanings of certain passages by false and wicked interpretations, and on this basis have attacked the imperial authority and the rights of the emperors, electors, and other princes and subjects of the empire. For they wrongfully assert that the emperor derives his position and authority from the Pope, and that the emperor elect is not the real emperor until his election is confirmed and approved, and he is crowned by the pope … We now declare … that the emperor holds his authority and position from God alone … he has full power … without the approval, confirmation, authorisation or consent of the pope or any other person.

-Sachsenhausen Appellation, 1324 (as translated here)

John excommunicated Louis, and Louis, well, he did the same to John — seizing on the pope’s hostility towards the movements for clerical poverty as excuse to declare put a Spiritual Franciscan into St. Peter’s Throne on his own say-so as imperial armies smashed through Italy.* If a pope was going to crown Louis, it was going to be his pope.


Antipope Nicholas V crowns Louis IV in May 1328.

Peter of Corbara (Pietro Rainalducci) had barely two years to deny himself the emoluments of antioffice before Louis’s withdrawal required his own submission to the man he had executed in effigy. John XXII didn’t go nearly that hard on the former “Nicholas V”: merely absolved him after confession and kept him comfortably imprisoned at the papal palace in Avignon until the would-be usurper’s peaceful death in 1333.

* This conflict forms the backdrop for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, set in late 1327. The narrator-monk Adso refers in his epilogue to having heard of the antipope’s elevation soon after leaving the monastery where the bulk of the novel’s action occurs.

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1318: Four Fraticelli friars

[Spiritual Franciscans record] the names of the condemned and the days or calends on which they suffered like martyrs.

-Inquisitor Bernard Gui (the gui from Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose)

On this date in 1318, four Franciscans — Jean Barrani, Deodat Michel, Guillem Sainton, and Pons Rocha — were burned at the stake in Marseilles.

This illustration of the martyred friars also adorns the cover of the book So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc … which tells the story of what happened next.

These Fraticelli were part of the great and multi-headed 13th-14th century movement towards spiritual poverty — movements like the Apostolic Brethren, of Fra Dolcino fame.

The worldly wealth of the Church, as Eco’s narrator explains it,

generated movements of men bent on a poorer life, in protest against the corrupt priests … [the Fraticelli] claimed that Christ and the apostles had owned no property, individually or in common; and the Pope condemned this idea as heretical. An amazing position, because there is no evident reason why a pope should consider perverse the notion that Christ was poor.

Distinct from Dolcino et al (who were outside any official institutional order) but mutually sympathetic with their like, the Fraticelli were “Spiritual” Franciscans who rejected the more worldly accoutrement that even their humble order had taken on.

“Hardly a handful [of Franciscans] can be found who will abstain from luxuries, wearing cheap, patched tunics, and going without shoes, like the first brethren and the blessed Francis,” complained the ascetic Ubertino of Casale in 1311. “It seems as if all the spiritual offices of the order were rated at a price.”

In the hands of a more supple pope, this popular energy might have helped the Church, but John XXII — who held his court at Avignon in the care and feeding of the French crown — rejected his predecessors’ attempts at brokering compromises and just cracked down.

“Great is poverty,” said the papal bull ordering an end to the disputation. (Quoted here.) “But greater is blamelessness, and perfect obedience is the greatest good.”

And you have to enforce perfect blamelessness.

It began in the Avignon papacy’s Provencal back yard: southern France, which had felt the papal whip before, had proven very fertile soil for the Fraticelli, with its own similar Beguin movements among the laity.

Soon after Pope John ascended the seat of St. Peter, 25 obdurate Spiritual Franciscans were summoned to Avignon to answer to the Inquisition; 21 of them succumbed to the menacing proceedings and produced their “obedient” recantations, leaving the four stern enough to persevere unto the stake.

Many more, too many to track from the era’s sketchy documentation, followed them in the ensuing years.

The fires kindled at Marseilles were a signal for the extermination of the Spiritualists throughout Provence. We hear of burnings at Narbonne, Montpelier, Toulouse, Lunel, Lodvfere, Carcassonne, Cabestaing, Beziers, Montreal. Mosheim tells us of a band of a hundred and thirteen Spirituals sacrificed at Carcassonne from 1318 to 1350. Wadding tells us that the Franciscan inquisitors alone burned one hundred and fourteen of the zealots in a single year (1323). And Angelo compares the indiscriminate frenzy of the persecutors to the fierceness of rabid dogs and wolves. The works of Olivi were condemned at the Pentecostal chapter of 1319 at Marseilles, and even the bones of many saints who had died uncondemned (though suspected), were cast out of their tombs. The result of the fierce persecutions was to stamp out the Spirituals in Provence.

Beguini combusti or “burned Beguins” (doc link) inspired their synoptic brethren, and strains of the persecuted movement persisted for many years.**

John XXII reaped the hatred of the put-upon Franciscans. According to Bernard McGinn’s study of reputed “papal antichrists”† John was “the pope who bears the distinction of being the most popular candidate for the role of Papal Antichrist in medieval history.”


Image of Pope John XXII as the Antichrist. 15th century image from the Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus, adapted from a c. 1340 illustration of the apocalyptic pro-Spiritual text as described in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages.

* Theologically, it was a dispute over whether Christ and the Apostles owned anything, singly or jointly. Politically, it pitted the Holy See against the Holy Roman Emperor, the classic Guelph-Ghibelline contest. (A few years on, there would be a Spiritual Franciscan appointed as antipope by the emperor.)

** William of Ockham — the Occam’s Razor guy — had to flee to imperial protection because, although not a radical Fraticello, he merely considered well-founded the doctrine that Christ and company didn’t own anything.

† In “Angel Pope and Papal Antichrist”, Church History (Jun., 1978)

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1323: Jourdain de l’Isle-Jourdain, Gascon rascal

On this date in 1323, Jourdain de l’Isle-Jourdain, lord of Casaubon, was “stripped naked, drawn on a hurdle from the Chatelet to the gibbet, and hanged there.” (Source)

This robber-baron‘s offense had been nothing less than the years-long defiance of his every actual and potential liege — consequence of the wide scope of action available to feudal nobles before the ascendance of absolutism.

Jourdain was the younger son of a lord, but managed to inherit a good chunk of land and marry into more of it … giving him power well beyond his merely nominal aristocratic rank.

Jourdain’s stomping ground was Gascony in the southwest of France, which in this period was a contested fringe of English and French authority* and so was under little true authority at all.

An unscrupulous operator could have a field day — or in Jourdain’s case, a field decade or two.

Joseph Klicklighter, “The Nobility of English Gascony: the case of Jourdain de l’Isle” in the Journal of Medieval History 13 (1987), pp. 327-342 documents Jourdain de l’Isle-Jourdain’s run of rapine in the “chaos and lawlessness” of 14th century Gascony.

He would occupy lands to extract official concessions, rip off the sailors and merchants crossing his territory, play English and French power off against one other (not neglecting to drag in the Avignonese pope John XXII, who had our crooked noble’s back as his kinsman), even rape, murder, and plunder outright. When forced to fight a judicial duel that turned out inconclusively, he peevishly razed a castle of his opponent.

“For years,” Klicklighter notes, “Jourdain de l’Isle was able to … pursue his wars and crimes and to flaunt ducal [English] and French authorities alike.”

Mind, he was hardly the only Gascon noble amok, but he seems to have been the most offensively undiplomatic of the lot. When the new French King Charles IV** sent armed envoys to summon him (along with other lords) to Paris, Jourdain had the envoys beheaded.

At last someone prevailed upon our man to make the trip, and despite arriving “in grand array and with great arrogance,” the French clapped him in prison with what we can only assume was relief. The Pope’s frantic appeals on Jourdain’s behalf didn’t do him any good: in fact, our man was hanged in a garment derisively sporting the papal insignia.

Though this date’s execution put an end to one man’s depravities, the violence attributable to his contumacious native region was just getting started. Fourteen years later, the next French monarch, Philip VI, went to put an end to this foolishness by definitively reclaiming Gascony for France … and triggered the Hundred Years War.

* Formally, Gascony was an English fief of the French crown. Functionally, that meant that whenever the English seneschal issued an edict, the local lords could ignore it by appealing to Parlement.

** Charles IV was the last ruler of the House of Capet … thanks in part to the dynasty-destroying Tour de Nesle scandal.

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