Gossip Destroys a Pope's Memory

How Pope Clement V's Memory was Runined by Giovanni Villani

Nov 12, 2009

Due to chronicler Giovanni Villani, Pope Clement V has wrongly been labeled a puppet of the French king, Philip IV.

Gossip columnists today can write damning articles with evidence that can be considered circumstantial at best. This might seem like a new phenomenon that spun out of our media driven society, but not a lot has changed from the pioneers of the profession: medieval chroniclers. The renowned fourteenth-century Italian chronicler, Giovanni Villani, claimed such fanciful transgressions by Pope Clement V that the pope was discredited and vilified for nearly seven hundred years after his death.

Indecision In the College of Cardinals

Clement V’s legacy as pope, prior to the momentous work of Guillaume Mollat in the early half of the twentieth-century, was one defined as a puppet for the French King Philip IV (the Fair). This legacy is due to the momentous chronicle of Giovanni Villani who helped define Clement’s papacy by popularizing, and to an extent legitimizing, a fictional back door deal the French king brokered with Clement while he was archbishop of Bordeaux.

The political backdrop to Villani’s tale is filled with indecision as the College of Cardinals was deadlocked for eleven months in electing Clement's predecessor, Pope Benedict XI’s. This shows that the College of Cardinals would be in a precarious situation in electing a new pope considering Benedict abdicated the papal throne.

King Philip Supposedly Offers the Pope a Deal

Villani’s story takes place in the forest of Saint-Jean-d'Angély where Clement, then Bertrand de Got, had an invented clandestine meeting with Philip the Fair. At this supposed meeting Clement agreed to six promises as long as Philip used his political sway to have the College of Cardinals elect the archbishop as the next pope.

The six promises were: to reconcile Philip with the Church after the Unam Sanctam conflict; release Philip and his followers from excommunication; grant Philip all the tithes in France for five years; condemn the memory of Boniface VIII; create cardinals friendly to France; and finally, a promise to be named later. These promises, according to Villani are what gave Clement his pontificate. More so, this type of myth making created hostility towards the pontiff that was ill informed, but harmful nonetheless.

This rumor was taken as truth and past historians took Clement’s later run-ins with the Templars and the falling out with Emperor Henry VII as a product of Philip’s power over the pope. It would take nearly seven hundred years for this clandestine meeting to be officially discredited as historians from all nationalities slowly took the meeting as fiction.

Taking the meeting out of consideration breaths new light on Clement and new interpretations of his papacy. What needs to be stressed about Clement’s situation seven hundred years ago is that Villani’s story of the six promises may not have been the only widely known piece of gossip against the pope, but it certainly was the most enduring in time. It only took the better part of a millennium, but a chronicler’s gossip is finally being academically ignored.

Villani, Giovanni, Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani. Translated by: Rose E. Selfe (Westminster: A. Constable, 1897)

Waley, Daniel. “Opinions of the Avignon Papacy: A Historiographical Sketch”, Storiographia e Storia. Studi in onore di Eugenio Dupre-Theseider (Rome, 1974): 175-88.

The copyright of the article Gossip Destroys a Pope's Memory in Late Middle Ages is owned by David Tubbs. Permission to republish Gossip Destroys a Pope's Memory in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.