settlement of questions relating to church debts; the granting of
lucrative benefices to Roman functionaries; the divers processes
by which the Curia acquired the immediate disposal of monastic,
capitulary and episcopal revenues—in short, all financial
matters are of the first importance. It was in the 14th century
more especially that the Apostolic Chamber spread the net
of its fiscal administration wider and wider over Christian
Europe; but at the close of the 13th century all the preliminary
measures had been taken to procure for the papal treasury its
enormous and permanent resources. The continued efforts of
the popes to drain Christian gold to Rome were limited only by
the fiscal pretensions of the lay sovereigns, and it was this
financial rivalry that gave rise to the inevitable conflict between
Boniface VIII. and Philip the Fair.
By thus devoting itself to material interests, the papacy contemporary with the last Capetians lost its moral greatness and fell in the opinion of the peoples; and it did itself no less injury by the abnormal extension of the bounds of its absolutism. By its exaggerated methods of centralization the papal monarchy had absorbed Abuse of the Papal Power. within itself all the living forces of the religious world and suppressed all the liberties in which the Church of old had lived. The subjection of the secular clergy was complete, while the episcopate retained no shadow of its independence. The decree of Clement IV. (1266), empowering the papacy to dispose of all vacant bishoprics at the court of Rome, merely sanctioned a usage that had long been established. But the control exercised by the Roman Curia over the episcopate had been realized by many other means. It was seldom that an episcopal election took, place without a division in the chapter, in which resided the electoral right. In such an event, the competitors appealed to the Holy See and abdicated their right, either voluntarily or under coercion, in manibus papae, while the pope took possession of the vacant see. Nominations directly made by the court of Rome, especially in the case of dioceses long vacant, became increasingly numerous. The principle of election by canons was repeatedly violated, and threatened to disappear; and at the end of the 13th century the spectacle was common of prelates, whether nominated or confirmed by the pope, entitling themselves “bishops by the grace of the Holy See.” The custom in force required bishops established by papal authority to take an oath of fidelity to the pope and the Roman Church, and this oath bound them in a particular fashion to the Curia. Those bishops, however, who had been elected under normal conditions, conformably to the old law, were deprived of the essential parts of their legitimate authority. They lost, for example, their jurisdiction, which they were seldom able to exercise in their own names, but in almost every case as commissaries delegated by the apostolic authority.
The regular clergy, who were almost wholly sheltered from the power of the diocesan bishops, found themselves, even more than the secular priesthood, in a state of complete dependence on the Curia. The papacy of this period continually intervened in the internal affairs of the monasteries. Not only did the monks continue to seek from the papacy the confirmation of their privileges and property, but they also referred almost all their disputes to the arbitration of the pope. Their elections gave rise to innumerable lawsuits, which all terminated at the court of Rome, and in most cases it was the pope himself who designated the monks to fill vacant posts in the abbeys. Thus the pope became the great ecclesiastical elector as well as the universal judge and supreme legislator. On this extreme concentration of the Christian power was employed throughout Europe an army of official agents or officious adherents of the Holy See, who were animated by an irrepressible zeal for the aggrandizement of the papacy. These officials originally consisted of an obedient and devoted militia of mendicant friars, both Franciscans and Dominicans, who took their orders from Rome alone, and whose efforts the papacy stimulated by lavishing exemptions, privileges, and full sacerdotal powers. Subsequently they were represented by the apostolic notaries, who were charged to exercise throughout Christendom the gracious jurisdiction of the leaders of the Church and to preside over the most important acts in the private lives of the faithful. These tools of Rome, both clerks and laymen, continued to increase in every diocese. They were not invested with their office until they had been examined by a papal chaplain, or sometimes even by the vice-chancellor of the Curia.
The sovereign direction of this enormous monarchy belonged to the pope alone, who was assisted in important affairs by the advice and collaboration of the College of Cardinals, who had become the sole electors to the papacy. Towards the close of the 13th century the necessity arose for an express ruling on the question of the exercise of this electoral right. In 1274 Gregory X., completing the measures taken by Alexander III. in the 12th century, promulgated the celebrated constitution by which the cardinal-electors were shut up in conclave and, in the event of their not having designated the new pope within three days, were constrained to perform their duty by a progressive reduction of their food-allowance (see Conclave). But at the head of this vast body there existed a constant tendency which was opposed to the absorption of all the power by a single and unbridled will. In the last years of this period fresh signs appeared of a reaction that emanated from the Sacred College itself. The cardinal-electors endeavoured to derive from their electoral power a right of control over the acts of the pope elect. In 1294, and again in 1303, they laid themselves under an obligation, previously to the election, to subscribe to the political engagements which each promised rigorously to observe in the event of his becoming pope. In general, these engagements bore upon the limitation of the number of cardinals, the prohibition to nominate new ones without previous notification to the Sacred College, the sharing between the cardinals and the pope of certain revenues specified by a bull of Nicholas IV., and the obligatory consultation of the consistories for the principal acts of the temporal and spiritual government. It is conceivable that a pope of Boniface VIII.’s temperament would not submit kindly to any restriction of the discretionary power with which he was invested by tradition, and he endeavoured to make the cardinals dependent on him and even to dispense with their services as far as possible, only assembling them in consistory in cases of extreme necessity. This tendency of the Sacred College to convert the Roman Church into a constitutional monarchy, in which it should itself play the part of parliament, was a sufficiently grave symptom of the progress of the new spirit. But throughout the ecclesiastical society traditional bonds were loosened and anarchy was rife, and this at the very moment when the enemies of the priesthood and its leaders redoubled their attack. In fine, the decadence of the papal institution manifested itself in an irremediable manner when it had accomplished no more than the half of its task. The growth of national kingdoms, the anti-clerical tendencies of the emancipated middle classes, the competition of lay imperialisms, and all the other elements of resistance which had been encountered by the papacy in its progress and had at first tended only to shackle it, now presented an insurmountable barrier. The papacy was weakened by its contest with these adverse elements, and it was through its failure to triumph over them that its dream of European dominion, both temporal and spiritual, entered but very incompletely into the field of realities. (A. Lu.)
III.—Period from 1305 to 1590.
The accession of the Gascon Clement V. in 1305 marks the
beginning of a new era in the history of the papacy; for this
pope, formerly archbishop of Bordeaux, remained
in France, without once crossing the threshold of
the Eternal City. Clement’s motive for this resolution
was his fear that the independence of theClement V. 1305–1314. Settlement
at Avignon.
ecclesiastical government might be endangered among the
frightful dissensions and party conflicts by which Italy was
then convulsed; while at the same time he yielded to the pressure
