History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0132/01322.txt

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Title:       First Great Jubilee Of The Roman Catholic Church
Author:      Gregorovius, Ferdinand

First Great Jubilee Of The Roman Catholic Church

1300

     Benedetto Gaetani, born at Anagni, Italy, about 1228 - whom contemporary
poets and historians also consigned to infamy - occupied the pontifical throne
but the years, 1294-1303, but those were years of almost continual strife.  It
is indeed likely that partisanship painted him, in some respects, with colors
too black, attributing to him crimes of which he was not guilty. But even
these exaggerations of dispraise were due to the unquestioned facts of his
character and career.  When at length Boniface was worsted in his quarrel with
Philip the Fair, a widespread reaction began on the part of the laity against
ecclesiastical assumptions, and the great dramatic act by which, under
Hildebrand, the papacy first displayed its power had its counterpart in the
manner of its decline.  "The drama of Anagni is to be set against the drama of
Canossa."

     But Boniface enjoyed one year of triumph scarcely paralleled in all the
experience of his fellow-pontiffs.  This was the closing year of the
thirteenth century.  Taking advantage of a fresh wave of religious enthusiasm
which then swept over Europe, the Pope called upon the Christian world-almost
at peace from long warfare - to celebrate a jubilee.  The institution of the
Catholic jubilee is generally considered as dating from this celebration,
though some writers refer its establishment to the pontificate of Innocent
III, a century earlier.

     Boniface VIII inaugurated the fourteenth century with a pilgrimage
festival which has become renowned.  The centennial jubilee had been
celebrated in ancient Rome by magnificent games; the recollections of these
games, however, had expired, and no tidings inform us whether the close or
beginning of a century was marked in Christian Rome by any ecclesiastical
festival.  The immense processions of pilgrims to St. Peter's had ceased
during the crusades; the crusades ended, the old longing reawoke among the
people and drew them again to the graves of the apostles.  The pious impulse
was fostered in no small degree by the shrewdness of the Roman priests.

     About the Christmas of 1299 - and with Christmas, according to the style
of the Roman curia, the year ended - crowds flocked both from the city and
country to St. Peter's.  A cry, promising remission of sins to those who made
the pilgrimage to Rome, resounded throughout the world and forced it into
movement.  Boniface gave form and sanction to the growing impulse by
promulgating the bull of jubilee of February 22, 1300, which promised
remission of sins to all who should visit the basilicas of St. Peter and St.
Paul during the year.  The pilgrimage of Italians was to last for thirty days,
that of foreigners for fifteen.  The enemies of the Church were alone
excluded.  As such the Pope designated Frederick of Sicily, the Colonnas and
their adherents, and, curiously enough, all Christians who held traffic with
Saracens.  Boniface consequently made use of the jubilee to brand his enemies
and to exclude them from the privileges of Christian grace.

     The pressure toward Rome was unexampled.  The city presented the aspect
of a camp where crowds of pilgrims, that resembled armies, thronged
incessantly in and out.  A spectator standing on one of the heights of the
city might have seen swarms like wandering tribes approach along the ancient
Roman roads from north, south, east, and west; and, had he mixed among them,
might have had difficulty in discovering their home.  Italians, Provencals,
Frenchmen, Hungarians, Slavs, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen came.

     Italy gave free passage to pilgrims and kept the Truce of God.  The
crowds arrived, wearing the pilgrim's mantle or clad in their national dress,
on foot, on horseback, or on cars, leading the ill and weary, and laden with
their luggage.  Veterans of a hundred were led by their grandsons; and youths
bore, like Aeneas, father or mother on their shoulders.  They spoke in many
dialects, but they all sang in the same language the litanies of the Church,
and their longing dreams had but one and the same object.

     On beholding in the sunny distance the dark forest of towers of the holy
city they raised the exultant shout, "Rome, Rome!" like sailors who after a
tedious voyage catch their first glimpse of land.  They threw themselves down
in prayer and rose again with the fervent cry, "St. Peter and St. Paul, have
mercy." They were received at the gates by their countrymen and by guardians
appointed by the city to show them their quarters; nevertheless, they first
made their way to St. Peter's, ascended the steps of the vestibule on their
knees, and then threw themselves in ecstasies on the grave of the apostle.

     During an entire year Rome swarmed with pilgrims and was filled with a
perfect babel of tongues.  It was said that thirty thousand pilgrims entered
and left the city daily, and that daily two hundred thousand pilgrims might
have been found within it.  An exemplary administration provided for order and
for moderate prices.  The year was fruitful, the Campagna and the neighboring
provinces sent supplies in abundance.  One of the pilgrims who was a
chronicler relates that "bread, wine, meat, fish, and oats were plentiful and
cheap in the market; the hay, however, was very dear; the inns so expensive
that I was obliged to pay for my bed and the stabling of my horse (beyond the
hay and oats) a Tornese groat a day.  As I left Rome on Christmas eve, I saw
so large a party of pilgrims depart that no one could count the number.  The
Romans reckon that altogether they have had two millions of men and women.  I
frequently saw both sexes trodden under foot, and it was sometimes with
difficulty that I escaped the same fate myself."

     The way that led from the city across the bridge of St. Angelo to St.
Peter's was too narrow; a new street was therefore opened in the walls along
the river, not far from the ancient tomb known as Meta Romuli.  The bridge was
covered with booths, which divided it in two, and in order to prevent
accidents it was enacted that those going to St. Peter's should keep to one
side of the bridge; those returning, to the other.  Processions went
incessantly to St. Paul's without the walls and to St. Peter's, where the
already renowned relic, the handkerchief of Veronica, was exhibited.  Every
pilgrim laid on offering on the altar of the apostle, and the same chronicler
of Asti assures us, as an eye-witness, that two clerics stood by the altar of
St. Paul's day and night, who with rakes in their hands gathered in untold
money.

     The marvellous sight of priests, who smilingly shovelled up gold like
hay, caused malicious Ghibellines to assert that the Pope had appointed the
jubilee solely for the sake of gain.  Boniface in truth stood in need of money
to defray the expenses of the war with Sicily, which swallowed up incalculable
sums.  If instead of copper, the monks in St. Paul's had lighted on gold
florins, they would necessarily have collected fabulous wealth, but the heaps
of money, both in St. Peter's and St. Paul's, consisted mainly of small coins,
the gifts of poor pilgrims.

     Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi pointedly comments on the fact, and laments
the change of times, when only the poor gave offerings, and when kings no
longer, like the three magi, brought gifts to the Saviour.  The receipts of
the jubilee, which the Pope was able to devote to the two basilicas for the
purchase of estates, were sufficiently considerable.  If in ordinary years the
gifts of pilgrims to St. Peter's amounted to thirty thousand four hundred gold
florins, we may conclude how much greater must have been the gains of the year
of jubilee.  "The gifts of pilgrims," wrote the chronicler of Florence, "yield
treasures to the Church, and the Romans all grow wealthy by the sale of their
goods."

     The year of jubilee was for them indeed a year of wealth.  The Romans,
therefore, treated the pilgrims with kindness, and nothing is heard of any act
of violence.  If the fall of the house of Colonna had aroused enemies to the
Pope in Rome, he disarmed them by the immense profits which accrued to the
Romans who have always lived solely on the money of foreigners.  Their
senators at this time were Richard Anibaldi of the Colosseum, from which the
Anibaldi had already expelled the Frangipani, and Gentile Orsini, whose name
may still be read on an inscription in the Capitol.  These gentlemen did not
permit the pious enthusiasm of the pilgrimage to prevent them from making war
in the neighborhood.  They allowed the pilgrims to pray at the altars, but
they themselves advanced with the Roman banners against Toscanella, which they
subjugated to the Capitol.

     We may imagine on how vast a scale Rome sold relics, amulets, and images
of saints, and at the same time how many remains of antiquity, coins, gems,
rings, statues, marble remains, and also manuscripts were carried back by the
pilgrims to their homes.  When they had sufficiently satisfied their religious
instincts, these pilgrims turned with astonished gaze to the monuments of the
past.

     Ancient Rome, through which they wandered, the book of the Mirabilia in
their hand, exercised its profound spell upon them.  Besides the recollections
of antiquity other memories of the deeds of popes and emperors, from the time
of Charles the Great, animated this classic theatre of the world in the year
1300.  Every mind, alive to the language of history, must have felt deeply the
influence of the city at this time, when troops of pilgrims from every
country, wandering in this world of majestic ruins, bore living testimony to
the eternal ties which bound Rome to mankind.  It can scarcely be doubted that
Dante beheld the city in these days, and that a ray from them fell on his
immortal poem which begins with Easter week of the year 1300.

     The sight of the capital of the world inspired the soul of another
Florentine.  "I also found myself," writes Giovanni Villani, "in that blessed
pilgrimage to the holy city of Rome, and as I beheld the great and ancient
things within her, and read the histories and the great deeds of the Romans -
which Vergil, Sallust, Lucan, Titus Livius, Valerius, Paul Orosius, and other
great masters of history have described - I took style and form from them,
although as a pupil I was not worthy to do so great a work.  And thus in 1300,
returned from Rome, I began to write this book to the honor of God and St.
John and to the commendation of our city of Florence." The fruit of Villani's
creative enthusiasm was his history of Florence, the greatest and most naive
chronicle that has been produced in the beautiful Italian tongue; and it is
possible that many other talented men may have received fruitful impressions
from Rome at this time.

     For Boniface the jubilee was a real victory.  The crowds that streamed to
Rome showed him that men still retained their belief in the city as the sacred
temple of the united world.  The monster festival of reconciliation seemed to
flow like a river of grace over its own past, and to wipe away the hated
recollection of Celestine V, of his war with the Colonnas, and all the
accusations of his enemies.  In these days he could revel in a feeling of
almost divine power, as scarcely any pope had been able to do before him.  He
sat on the highest throne of the West, adorned by the spoils of empire, as the
"vicar of God" on earth.  As the dogmatic ruler of the world, the keys of
blessing and destruction in his hand, he beheld thousands from distant lands
come before his throne and cast themselves in the dust before him as before a
higher being.  Kings, however, he did not see.  Beyond Charles Martel, no
monarch came to Rome to receive, as a penitent, absolution for his sins. This
shows that the faith, which the battles of Alexander III and Innocent III had
formerly won, was extinguished at royal courts.

     Boniface VIII closed the memorable festival on Christmas Eve of the year
1300.  It forms an epoch in the history of the papacy, as in that of Rome. The
year of jubilee and enthusiasm was followed, in terrible contrast, by the
tragic end of the Pope, the fall of the papacy from its height, and the
decline of Rome to a condition of awful solitude.