The next pope was Jacques Fournier, Benedict XII. and the next, Pierre
Roger, archbishop of Rouen, called Clement VI. The Holy See had now
been thirty years without a home of its own. It had resided as tenant
at Avignon, and paid rent to the Angevine Kings of Naples, called
Angevine from their founder Charles of Anjou brother of Saint Louis.
The Angevines were a disreputable set, and Queen Jane the heiress at
that period, was not the best of them. Clement VI. bought Avignon
of Jane for eighty thousand florins in gold which Voltaire says he
never paid. He made it up to her however, by a transaction in his own
line, to the understanding of which we must look a little into Jane’s
qualities and conduct. She was married four times, and neither time
did she make a good wife. Her first husband Andrew of Hungary, she
strangled; her second, Louis of Tarento, she poisoned; her third, James
of Aragon, perished nobody knows how; her fourth, Otho of Brunswick,
prudently kept away from her. At last, her cousin Charles of Durazzo
dethroned her, and served her as she had served her first husband--that
is choked her, and that was the end of Jane. Before this last
culmination, the pope had pardoned her sins. They were as scarlet, and
he made them white like snow; and when you reflect that the catalogue
embraced the assassination of at least two husbands, you will admit
that according to any reasonable tariff, the pontiff did not remain her
debtor.
It was during the reign of Clement VI. that the citizens of Rome, sick
of misrule, revolted and created Nicholas Rienzi tribune of the people,
and thus conjured up a ghost of the ancient republic. At Rome you are
still shown the house of Rienzi.
Like the rest, Clement played with his thunderbolts. He excommunicated
Waldemar king of Denmark for having made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land
without his permission, which shows how hazardous it was in those days,
to be pious on mere impulse and without due license from the Church.
Next came Innocent VI. and then Urban V. who was a Marseilles abbot.
Urban undertook to be a great pope, but the Captivity was no time
for great popes. Urban’s spiritual artillery seemed to have the same
disagreeable property of recoil as that of our old friend Boniface VIII.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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