The History of the Renaissance World (68 page)

The old fortifications had not been kept in repair, and terror prevailed, such as never before had been seen or heard of. All men, great and small, were in dismay. Such a concourse had crowded into the city that the streets and markets and mosques could not contain them. Everything became very dear. The roads were stopped against caravans and merchants, and distress fell upon the people.
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‘Ala’-ud-Din summoned governors and their armies from all over his sultanate to report to Delhi for its defense. But, given the state of the city and the panic inside its gates, he ignored the advice of his councillors to prepare for siege and marched out of Delhi, towards a pitched battle on open ground.

The battle lines between the two massive armies stretched on for miles. ‘Ala’-ud-Din himself commanded the central units, with his brother in charge of the left wing, and his friend and general Zafar on the right. His own troops, equipped with hundreds of elephants, broke the Mongol line in front of him; Zafar’s wing also drove back the enemy, but in chasing them down, Zafar lost two horses from beneath him and finally was killed. After nearly a full day of fighting, the Mongols began to retreat. They made their way back to the Khyber Pass, losing more men to illness and exhaustion along the way. Duwa’s son himself died on the forced journey.

‘Ala’-ud-Din made his way back to Delhi in a state of triumph so ecstatic that, once back, he announced his intention of founding a new religion. (“My sword . . . will bring all men to adopt it,” he told his courtiers. “Through this religion, my name and that of my friends will remain among men to the last day, like the names of the Prophet and his friends.”) He named himself “The Second Alexander” and had this title embossed on his coins, announcing his intentions to go out like Alexander the Great and conquer the known world.
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The threat of the Mongol return had convinced the sultan that Delhi needed a huge standing army. One of his chroniclers notes that he built his forces until he had a standing cavalry of 475,000 horsemen. Unlike many kings at the turn of the century, he paid regular salaries to his soldiers; so that they could live comfortably on the salaries, he introduced fixed prices into the markets of Delhi, setting state-controlled limits on the costs of grain, fruit, sugar, oil, even shoes and coats. Merchants who were caught price gouging were arrested; if convicted, they were punished with the removal of flesh equal to the weight of the falsely priced goods sold.

To funnel money towards defense, ‘Ala’-ud-Din also restricted the ability of his noblemen to live luxuriously; anyone who wanted to throw a huge party or indulge in a major purchase had to get permission from the Market Controller, a new office introduced into Delhi’s government by the sultan. He repaired all of the frontier forts, garrisoned them with well-trained regiments, and branded the military’s horses to prevent theft or unauthorized sale. He put into place an espionage system to warn him of Mongol movements and unprepared fortress commanders, of discontented soldiers and possible revolt. By the century’s turn, the Mongol threat had helped to turn the sultanate of Delhi into one of the most efficient, tightly controlled, and aggressive empires in the world.
¹⁴

Chapter Fifty-Nine

The End of the Papal Monarchy

Between 1301 and 1317,
Boniface VIII destroys the Templars,
infuriates the king of France,
and takes the papacy into exile

A
S THE CENTURY TURNED
, Pope Boniface VIII made a massive effort to restore the old power of the papacy; the power it had held back in the days of Innocent IV, more than half a century before.

But fifty years down the road, it was now apparent that Innocent had unintentionally put an expiration date on the power of Saint Peter’s heir. He had excommunicated Frederick II, authorized civil war in the Holy Roman Empire, and helped to split Germany, Sicily, and Italy apart; and in doing so, he had deprived the papacy of its strongest potential ally, a Holy Roman Emperor with the power to protect the Church’s interest across all three lands.

Now there was no Holy Roman Emperor at all. Sicily was controlled by James of Aragon; southern Italy, the “Kingdom of Naples,” by Charles the Lame, son of Charles of Anjou; Germany, by Rudolf of Hapsburg’s son Albert. Louis IX’s throne was occupied by Philip IV, nicknamed “Philip the Fair” for his good looks; he was much less well-disposed towards the privileges of the Church than his pious grandfather.

And the northern Italian cities were caught in a massive and complicated power struggle between two rival political parties.

These factions, known as Guelph and Ghibelline, had started out in the twelfth century, as supporters to two rival candidates for the Holy Roman Emperorship: Conrad of Hohenstaufen (the Ghibellines) and Henry the Lion (the Guelphs). The Hohenstaufens had successfully snagged the title, meaning that the family’s Ghibelline loyalists in Italy were now ardent supporters of the empire’s power over those perpetually rebellious Lombard lands.

A hundred years later, the Ghibelline and Guelph parties had lost most of their pro- and anti-empire leanings. But they still existed as hostile factions, with members of each struggling for control of Italian cities north of the Papal States. By this point, those struggles had lost any identification with the fate of the empire: they were struggles for control over ports, trading privileges, tax breaks. Like any political party that survives for more than a century and a half, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines had taken on a culture and life of their own, divorced from their original purpose.
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Boniface VIII now had to negotiate with all of the complicated and opposing powers that surrounded him: a much more difficult and precarious task than his predecessors had faced in dealing with their Holy Roman Emperors.

In northern Italy, he decided to ally himself with the Guelphs. A vicious and ongoing fight between Guelph and Ghibelline families (the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi) had devolved into an even bloodier fight within the Guelphs themselves. Two branches of the Cancellieri, the Bianchi and the Neri (the “White Guelphs” and the “Black Guelphs”) were carrying on a vigorous private warfare. Unable to persuade the two clans to make peace, Boniface VIII invited Philip IV’s younger brother, Charles of Valois, to come into Italy and settle the fight.

Charles had crossed into northern Italy just before the turn of the century; motivated, says Giovanni Villani, “in the hope of being Emperor, because of the promises of the Pope.” His army was now headquartered at Florence, which was suffering greatly from the White and Black rivalry. He negotiated an alliance with the Neri, the Black Guelphs; and in November of 1301, with papal approval, Charles of Valois and his soldiers helped the Neri launch a feud-ending attack on their enemies in Florence, both White Guelph and Ghibelline. Six days of sacking and burning, looting of shops, and the murder of White partisans followed. The great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, himself a White loyalist, lost his house and his possessions and was forced to flee from the city; the rest of his life was spent in exile, which accounts for his sour assessment of Charles in the
Divine Comedy
(“Not land, but sin and infamy, / Shall [he] gain”).
²

Charles mismanaged the Florentine purge, which rapidly became much bloodier than Boniface had intended. In disgrace with his brother Philip, and running short on money, he was forced to return to France shortly after. But he had done Boniface’s bidding, and for a time the warfare in northern Italy lessened.

Meanwhile, Boniface dealt with Philip IV on a different front. Philip the Fair had already imposed taxes on the French church in order to help pay for his ongoing wars; he had made an uneasy peace with Edward of England, but he had continued to fight against the Count of Flanders. This was expensive, so Philip refused to hear Boniface’s complaints about the ecclesiastical taxes. He also insisted on his right to try clergymen in royal courts and to control the appointments of French priests to empty cathedral posts: all of the old issues between kings and pope, still alive and present.

In December of 1301, Boniface sent the king a papal letter reasserting the arguments of his powerful forerunners, all the way back to Gregory the Great.
Ausculta fili
, it began: “Listen, son . . .”

God has set us over kings and kingdoms. . . . [L]et no one persuade you that you have no superior or that you are not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. . . . Our predecessors deposed three kings of France . . . and although we are not worthy to tread in the footsteps of our predecessors, if the king committed the same crimes as they committed or greater ones, we would depose him like a servant with grief and great sorrow.

Philip IV read the letter, and then set it on fire.
³

This set him on the high road to excommunication; to guard himself against the inevitable public backlash that would follow, Philip did his best to rally his people behind him. In April of 1302, he summoned to Paris the two most powerful bodies of men in the country: the dukes who ruled the great counties of France, and the leading French churchmen. To these he added, for the first time, a third group: the “deputies of the good towns,” the mayors, prominent citizens, and wealthy merchants of the largest cities. All three assemblies agreed with him; Boniface was in the wrong, and Philip’s defiance was entirely justified.
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At the same time, he was struggling in Flanders. On July 11, 1302, a large French army commanded by the distinguished Robert of Artois faced down a force of Flemish foot soldiers, and was horribly defeated near Courtrai. The battlefield, crisscrossed with ditches dug by the Flemish, tripped up the French cavalry; the horses became entangled, falling into the water-filled trenches and throwing their riders, and the Flemish infantry systematically advanced through them, finishing off both men and horses. “Kill all that has spurs on!” their commander, Guy de Namur, called out; and within three hours, the “flower of French chivalry,” an entire army of elite French knights, had been slaughtered. Robert of Artois died among them. Afterwards, the peasants of Flanders scoured the battlefield, taking the golden spurs from the bodies of all of the aristocrats. More than five hundred pairs were hung as trophies in the nearby Church of Our Lady, at Courtrai.
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In the fall of that same year, another letter arrived from Boniface, even more threatening than the previous one. “If therefore the temporal power errs, it must be judged by the spiritual,” Boniface wrote, “. . . but if the supreme spiritual power commit faults, it can be judged by God alone, and not by any man.” He could condemn Philip, but Philip was powerless to retaliate.
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Philip was in no mood to hear it. When Boniface finally excommunicated him, in the fall of 1303, he sent Guillaume de Nogaret, his own Keeper of the Seal, to head up a sneak attack on the pope at Anagni. They broke into the pontiff’s residence at night on September 7, twelve hours before Boniface was due to issue a bull of deposition that would remove Philip from the French throne, and took the pope away to a nearby castle.
⁷

They probably intended to force him into lifting the deposition, but three days later Boniface VIII was rescued by a small band of friends from Rome and taken to the Vatican. He died there a month later at sixty-eight years old, worn out by stress and fury.
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With him the old ideal of the papal monarchy—of the pope as spiritual king, over and above Church law—died too. Boniface had tried to corral the power that had once belonged to the empire, and had failed. His successor, Benedict XI, ruled for a matter of months; a yearlong argument between the French and the Italian cardinals followed, while the papal seat sat empty.

Things were looking up for Philip, who now won several victories in a row in Flanders. In the spring of 1305 he was able to force the Flemish to submit, on punitive terms. Victorious over Flanders, victorious over the pope, he now explained to the cardinals that his first choice for Benedict’s successor was the French archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand.