The Pope Who Sat Between Two Fires

Pierre Roger was elected pope at Avignon on 7 May 1342 and took the name Clement VI. He was 51, a Benedictine monk by background, a French aristocrat by birth, and possessed of one of the most impressive theological educations available in 14th-century Europe. He was also, by the standards of the medieval papacy, an unusually worldly man — a collector of art, a patron of music, an enthusiastic builder, and the maintainer of one of the most expensive courts in Europe. The Italian poet Petrarch, who lived for several years in the papal city, called Clement’s Avignon a “Babylon.”

Clement reigned for almost exactly a decade. He was pope when the pandemic that contemporaries called the Great Mortality reached Europe in 1347. He was pope when the disease killed approximately half of the city of Avignon in the spring of 1348. He was pope when the flagellants of 1349 marched through plague-stricken Europe and when the Rhineland massacres of the same year killed tens of thousands of Jews in cities the disease had not yet reached. He issued the formal papal responses to all of it. They had limited effect.

The man

Pierre Roger was born around 1290 or 1291 in the village of Maumont, in the Corrèze region of central France. He entered the Benedictine order at La Chaise-Dieu at the age of ten. He took degrees in theology at Paris, taught there, and was successively bishop of Arras, archbishop of Sens, and archbishop of Rouen. He was a cardinal by 1338. His election as pope in 1342, in the conclave at Avignon, was unusually fast.

His decade as pope was unusually well-funded. Clement bought the city of Avignon outright from the Countess of Provence in 1348 for 80,000 florins — a transaction that transferred the city from the count’s jurisdiction to the papacy and converted the temporary papal residence into a sovereign papal city. (Avignon would remain a papal territory until the French Revolution annexed it in 1791.) He spent extensively on the expansion of the Palais des Papes, the construction of which dominated Avignon’s economy throughout his pontificate. He maintained an art collection, a library, and a household of approximately 400 attendants and clerks.

Clement was, by the documentary record, intelligent, hard-working, autocratic, generous to his family (eleven of his close relatives received cardinal’s hats), and conventionally devout in his personal religious practice. He kept a mistress, the Viscountess of Turenne. He was, in short, a recognizable late-medieval French churchman of his time and class, and he sat on the chair of St. Peter when the worst pandemic in recorded history arrived in his city.

The plague at Avignon

The Black Death reached Avignon at the end of January 1348, carried up the Rhône from Marseille. The Italian notary Louis Heyligen, writing in April 1348 to friends in Bruges, gave the most detailed contemporary account: by the time of writing, half of Avignon was dead; the cardinals had fled; the cemeteries were full and the pope had consecrated the Rhône itself as a burial place, after which corpses were thrown directly into the river. The chronicler estimated that 62,000 had died in Avignon and its surrounding region by the time the disease subsided in the summer.

Clement’s personal survival is documented by his physician, Guy de Chauliac, who treated the pope through the pandemic and later wrote one of the most important surviving medical accounts in the Chirurgia Magna (1363). Chauliac’s prescription for the pope was simple: sit in a chamber between two large fires, constantly maintained, day and night, for the duration of the epidemic. The smoke and heat were thought to drive away the corrupted air that caused the disease. Clement followed the regimen. He did not contract plague. Whether the fires were actually responsible — or whether the seclusion they enforced reduced his exposure to infected individuals — is now impossible to disentangle.

Chauliac himself contracted bubonic plague, survived, and described the symptoms and progression in detail. He distinguished the bubonic and pneumonic forms accurately and recommended the treatments standard in 14th-century European medicine (purging, bleeding, opening of buboes), none of which had any effect. He estimated, conservatively, that the disease had killed three-quarters of the population in some affected regions.

The two bulls

The papal response to the Rhineland pogroms came in two documents, both issued in September 1348. The first, Sicut Judaeis, was a reaffirmation of the standing papal protection for Jewish communities first issued in this form by Calixtus II in 1120 (in direct response to the Rhineland massacres of 1096) and reissued by every subsequent pope through the medieval period. It instructed Christian rulers not to attack, kill, or compel the conversion of Jews under their jurisdiction.

The second, Quamvis Perfidiam, was more specific: it explicitly addressed the contemporary rumor that the Jews had caused the plague by poisoning wells. Clement stated, in the bull, that the rumor was false: Jews were dying of the plague in the same numbers as everyone else, the disease was clearly not the result of human action, and any clergy who participated in or encouraged anti-Jewish violence would be excommunicated. The bull was distributed through the network of papal nuncios across Europe.

The bulls had limited practical effect. The German political structure of the late 14th century gave individual cities, prince-bishops, and the Holy Roman Emperor substantial autonomy from Avignon. The Strasbourg massacre of February 1349, the Basel massacre of January 1349, and the Cologne massacre of August 1349 all proceeded despite the bulls. Most of the affected city councils ignored the papal instructions. The bulls were widely read, copied, and preserved, however, and they are the most important medieval papal documents on the subject. They formed the legal-theological foundation that later popes would invoke in further reissuances.

Clement also offered formal sanctuary at Avignon for Jews fleeing the German pogroms. Several thousand are believed to have taken refuge in the papal city during 1348 and 1349. They appear in the Avignon registers as taxpayers and residents.

Death

Clement VI died on 6 December 1352, aged 61. The cause is not recorded but was probably a long-standing kidney complaint that had troubled him for the previous two years. He was buried at the abbey of La Chaise-Dieu, where he had taken his vows as a boy. His tomb was destroyed in the Wars of Religion in the 16th century; only fragments survive.

His successor, Innocent VI, was a more austere figure who reversed several of Clement’s more conspicuous policies and reduced the conspicuous expenditure of the Avignon court. The pandemic itself returned in smaller waves in 1361, 1369, and 1374. The Avignon papacy continued until 1376, when Gregory XI returned to Rome; the Great Western Schism followed almost immediately.

Clement VI’s reputation has been ambivalent. He is remembered as one of the most worldly and politically able popes of the Avignon period, the protector of the Jews in 1348–1349, the man who survived the Black Death behind a wall of fire, and the builder of the Palais des Papes that remains the dominant medieval monument in Provence. The standard modern study, Diana Wood’s Clement VI (1989), treats him as a serious theologian and statesman who has been historically underestimated, partly because of Petrarch’s hostile portrait and partly because the next century — the schism — was unkind to all of the Avignon popes.