17 stories mention Pope Clement VI on DeadlyCurious.
Clement VI had spent the worst weeks of the 1348 Avignon plague seated continuously between two large fires on the medical advice of his personal physician Guy de Chauliac. The fires worked, probably by the convection currents they generated keeping plague-carrying air away from the papal chair. Clement died of natural causes in December 1352, aged about 61.
Read the story →Matteo Giovannetti of Viterbo was the principal painter at the Palais des Papes at Avignon from 1343 to 1367. His surviving frescoes — in the Saint-Martial chapel, the Saint-Jean chapel, and the audience hall — are the best-preserved examples of mid-14th-century Italian fresco work anywhere in Europe.
Read the story →Walram von Jülich, Archbishop of Cologne from 1332 to 1349, was the senior Catholic ecclesiastical authority for the entire lower Rhineland during the Black Death. He had personal authority sufficient to prevent the 1349 anti-Jewish massacres in his archdiocese. He chose not to use it.
Read the story →Pope Calixtus II issued the original *Sicut Judaeis* protective bull in 1120 in direct response to the 1096 First Crusade massacres of Rhineland Jews. The bull prohibited Christian violence against Jewish communities and was reissued by approximately twenty-five subsequent popes through the next three centuries.
Read the story →Guy de Chauliac served as personal physician to Popes Clement VI, Innocent VI, and Urban V at Avignon between 1342 and 1370. His *Chirurgia Magna* (1363) was the dominant European surgical textbook from the 14th century to the 17th — and contained the most detailed eyewitness account of the 1348 Black Death by a doctor who survived it.
Read the story →The Palais des Papes at Avignon was the residence of the seven Avignon popes between 1335 and 1377. It is the largest Gothic palace in Europe — about 15,000 square metres of floor area, with walls up to 50 metres tall. The French Revolution turned it into a barracks. Most of the original interior was lost.
Read the story →Konrad of Megenberg was a Regensburg canon and natural-philosophy writer who composed a tract in 1350 explicitly refuting the claim that Jews had caused the Black Death by poisoning wells. He used Aristotelian-medical argument against the popular conspiracy theory that had been justifying the Rhineland pogroms.
Read the story →Konrad of Megenberg was a Bavarian cleric and natural philosopher who wrote a Latin treatise during the 1349 Black Death arguing on medical and theological grounds that the well-poisoning accusations against European Jews were factually false. The treatise circulated in fewer than two dozen manuscript copies and had substantially no documented effect on the simultaneous massacres.
Read the story →Francesco Petrarca grew up in Avignon when his exiled Florentine father followed the papal court there in 1311. He spent four decades in and out of the city while writing the most famous polemical attacks on the Avignon papacy ever produced — coining the phrase "Babylonian captivity" that has defined the period since.
Read the story →Konrad Schmid led a flagellant heretical movement in central Germany through the 1360s, predicting that the world would end in 1369. Approximately 168 of his followers were burned at the stake. The exact date and place of Schmid's own death are uncertain. Some of his followers continued to predict the end of the world into the 15th century.
Read the story →After the Rhineland massacres of 1096, the papacy issued a formal bull that prohibited the killing or forced conversion of Jews. Every subsequent medieval pope reissued it. The bull was widely violated. It nonetheless established the legal framework on which medieval Jewish communities could appeal.
Read the story →Between 1347 and 1351 a pandemic killed somewhere between a third and half of everyone in Europe. Contemporaries called it the Great Mortality. It was the largest single demographic event in recorded human history.
Read the story →Pope Clement VI spent the Black Death sitting in a heated room in Avignon, protected by a wall of fire on the advice of his physician. He issued the bulls that tried to stop the massacres of Jews. They did not stop.
Read the story →Cologne's Jewish community had stood since the fourth century. On the night of Saint Bartholomew, August 1349, a mob ended it in a few hours.
Read the story →Five weeks before the Strasbourg massacre, Basel built a wooden house on an island in the Rhine, locked roughly six hundred of its Jews inside, and burned it.
Read the story →Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.
Read the story →In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.
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