is related that a young woman had put before him at table a basket of fresh figs, of which he had eaten and which had poisoned him. The chroniclers of the time impute this crime to William of Nogaret, to the Colonnas, and to their associates at Anagni; a single one names King Philip. Popular credulity is great in matters of poisoning; but one thing is certain, namely, that no prosecution was ordered. There is no proof of Philip’s complicity; but, full as he was of hatred and dissimulation, he was of those who do their best to profit by crimes which they have not ordered. It is clear that such a pope as Benedict XI. would not do either for his passions or his purposes.
He found one, however, from whom he flattered himself, not without reason, that he would get more complete and efficient co-operation. The cardinals, after being assembled in conclave for six months at Perouse, were unable to arrive at an agreement about a choice of pope. As a way out of their embarrassment, they entered into a secret convention to the effect that one of them, a confidant of Philip the Handsome, should make known to him that the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Goth, was the candidate in respect of whom they could agree. He was a subject of the King of England and a late favorite of Boniface VIII., who had raised him from the bishopric of Comminges to the archbishopric of Bordeaux. He was regarded as an enemy of France; but Philip knew what may be done with an ambitious man, whose fortune is only half made, by offering to advance him to his highest point. He, therefore, appointed a meeting with the archbishop. “Hearken,” said he: “I have in my grasp wherewithal to make thee pope if I please; and provided that thou promise me to do six things I demand of thee, I will confer upon thee that honor; and to prove to thee that I have the power, here be letters and advices I have received from Rome.” After having heard and read, “the Gascon, overcome with joy,” says the contemporary historian Villani, “threw himself at the king’s feet, saying, ‘My lord, now know I that thou art my best friend, and that thou wouldest render me good for evil. It is for thee to command and for me to obey: such will ever be my disposition.’ ” Philip then set before him his six demands, amongst which there were only two which could have caused the archbishop any uneasiness. The fourth purported that he should condemn the memory of Pope Boniface. “The sixth, which is important and secret, I keep to myself,” said Philip, “to make known to thee in due time and place.” The archbishop bound himself by oath taken on the sacred host to accomplish the wishes of the king, to whom, furthermore, he gave as hostages his brother and his two nephews. Six weeks after this interview, on the 5th of June, 1305, Bertrand de Goth was elected pope, under the name of Clement V.
It was not long before he gave the king the most certain pledge of his docility. After having held his pontifical court at Bordeaux and Poitiers he declared that he would fix his residence in France, in the county of Venaissin, at Avignon, a territory which Philip the Bold had remitted to Pope Gregory X. in execution of a deed of gift from Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse. It was renouncing, in fact, if not in law, the practical independence of the papacy to thus place it in the midst of the dominions and under the very thumb of the King of France. “I know the Gaseous,” said the old Italian Cardinal Matthew Rosso, dean of the Sacred College, when he heard of this resolution; “it will be long ere the Church comes back to Italy.” And, indeed, it was not until sixty years afterwards, under Pope Gregory XI., that Italy regained possession of the Holy See; and historians called this long absence the Babylonish captivity. Philip lost no time in profiting by his propinquity to make the full weight of his power felt by Clement V. He claimed from him the fulfilment of the fourth promise Bertrand de Goth had made in order to become pope, which was the condemnation of Boniface VIII.; and he revealed to him the sixth, that “important and secret one which he kept to himself to make known to him in clue time and place;” and it was the persecution and abolition of the order of the Templars. The pontificate of Clement V. at Avignon was, for him, a nine years’ painful effort, at one time to elude and at another to accomplish, against the grain, the heavy engagements he had incurred towards the king.
He found the condemnation of Boniface VIII. rather an embarrassment than a danger. He shrank, on becoming pope, from condemning the pope his predecessor, who had appointed him archbishop and cardinal. Instead of an official condemnation, he offered the king satisfaction in various ways. It was only from headstrong pride and to cloak himself in the eyes of his subjects that Philip clung to the condemnation of the memory of Boniface; and, after a long period of mutual tergiversation, it was agreed in the end to let bygones be bygones. The principal promoter of the assault at Anagni, William of Nogaret, was the sole exception to the amnesty; and the pope imposed upon him, by way of penance, merely the obligation of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which he never fulfilled. On the contrary he remained, in great favor, about the person of King Philip, who made him his chancellor, and gave him, in Languedoc, some rich lands, amongst others those of Calvisson, Massillargues, and Manduel. For Philip knew how to liberally reward and faithfully support his servants.
And he knew still better how to persecute and ruin his foes. He had no reason, of a public kind, to consider the Templars his enemies. It is true that they had given him a merely qualified support on his appeal to the council against Boniface VIII.; but, both before and after that occurrence, Philip had shown them marks of the most friendly regard. He had asked to be affiliated to their order; and he had borrowed their money. During a violent outbreak of the populace at Paris, in 1306, on the occasion of a fresh tax, he had sought and found a refuge in the very palace of the Temple, where the chapters-general were held and where its treasures were kept. It is said that the sight of these treasures kindled the longings of Philip, and his ardent desire to get hold of them. At the time of the formation of the order, in 1119, after the first crusade, the Templars were far from being rich. Nine knights had joined together to protect the arrival and sojourning of pilgrims in Palestine; and Baldwin II., the third Christian King of Jerusalem, had given them a lodging in his own palace, to the east of Solomon’s temple, whence they had assumed the name of “Poor United Champions of Christ and the Temple.” Their valor and pious devotion had soon rendered them famous in the West as well as the East; and St. Bernard had commended them to the Christian world. At the council of Troyes, in 1123, Pope Honorius II. had recognized their order, and regulated their dress, a white mantle, on which Pope Eugenius III. placed a red cross. In 1172 the rules of the order were drawn up in seventy-two articles, and the Templars began to exempt themselves from the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Jerusalem, recognizing that of the pope only. Their number and their importance rapidly increased. In 1130 the Emperor Lothaire II. gave them lands in the Duchy of Brunswick. They received other gifts in the Low Countries, in Spain, and in Portugal. After a voyage to the West, Hugh des Payens, the chief of the nine Templars, returned to the East with three hundred knights enlisted in his order; and a hundred and fifty years after its foundation the order of the Temple, divided into fourteen or fifteen provinces—four in the East and ten or eleven in the West—numbered, it is said, eighteen or twenty thousand knights, mostly French, and nine thousand commanderies or territorial benefices, the revenue of which is calculated at fifty-four millions of francs (about ten and a half million dollars). It was an army of monks, once poor men and hard-working soldiers, but now rich and idle, and abandoned to all the temptations of riches and idleness. There was still some fine talk about Jerusalem, pilgrims, and crusades. The popes still kept these words prominent, either to distract the Western Christians from intestine quarrels, or to really promote some new Christian effort in the East. The Isle of Cyprus was still a small Christian kingdom, and the warrior-monks, who were vowed to the defence of Christendom in the East, the Templars and the Hospitallers, had still in Palestine, Syria, Armenia, and the adjacent lands, certain battles to fight and certain services to render to the Christian cause. But these were events too petty and too transitory to give serious employment to the two great religious and military orders, whose riches and fame were far beyond the proportions of their public usefulness and their real strength; a position fraught with perils for them, for it inspired the sovereign powers of the state with the spirit rather of jealousy than fear of them.
In 1303 the king and the pope simultaneously summoned from Cyprus to France the Grand Master of the Templars, James do Molay, a Burgundian nobleman, who had entered the order when he was almost a child, had valiantly fought the infidels in the East, and fourteen years ago had been unanimously elected Grand Master. For several months he was well treated, to all appearance, by the two monarchs.
