A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [23]
His successors Benedict XII and Clement VI built in stages the great papal palace at Avignon on a rock overlooking the Rhône, a huge and inharmonious mass of roofs and towers without coherent design. Constructed in castle style around interior courts, with battlements and twelve-foot-thick walls for defense, it had odd pyramidal chimneys rising from the kitchens, banqueting halls and gardens, money chambers and offices, rose-windowed chapels, a steam room for the Pope heated by a boiler, and a gate opening on the public square where the faithful gathered to watch the Holy Father ride out on his white mule. Here moved the majestic cardinals in their wide red hats, “rich, insolent and rapacious” in Petrarch’s words, vying with each other in the magnificence of their suites. One required ten stables for his horses, and another rented parts of 51 houses to lodge all his retainers.
Corridors of the palace bustled with notaries and officers of the Curia and legates departing on or returning from their missions. Petitioners and their lawyers waited anxiously in anterooms, pilgrims crowded in the courtyards to receive the pontifical blessing, while through the halls passed the parade of the Pope’s relatives of both sexes in brocades and furs with their attending knights and squires and retainers. The household of sergeants-at-arms, ushers, chamberlains, chaplains, stewards, and servants numbered about 400, all supplied with board, lodging, clothing, and wages.
Tiled floors were ornamented in designs of flowers, fantastic beasts, and elaborate heraldry. Clement VI, a lover of luxury and beauty who used 1,080 ermine skins in his personal wardrobe, imported Matteo Giovanetti and artists from the school of Simone Martini to paint the walls with scenes from the Bible. The four walls of Clement’s own study, however, were entirely covered by scenes of a noble’s secular pleasures: a stag hunt, falconry, orchards, gardens, fishponds, and a group of ambiguous nude bathers who could be either women or children depending on the eye of the beholder. No religious themes intruded.
At banquets the Pope’s guests dined off gold and silver plate, seated beneath Flemish tapestries and hangings of silk. Receptions for visiting princes and envoys rivaled the splendors of any secular court. Papal entertainments, fetes, even tournaments and balls, reproduced the secular.
“I am living in the Babylon of the West,” wrote Petrarch in the 1340s, where prelates feast at “licentious banquets” and ride on snow-white horses “decked in gold, fed on gold, soon to be shod in gold if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury.” Though himself something of a lapsed cleric, Petrarch shared the clerical habit of denouncing at double strength whatever was disapproved. Avignon became for him “that disgusting city,” though whether because of worldly corruption or the physical filth and smells of its narrow, overcrowded streets is uncertain. The town, crammed with merchants, artisans, ambassadors, adventurers, astrologers, thieves, prostitutes, and no less than 43 branches of Italian banking houses (in 1327), was not so well equipped as the papal palace for the disposal of sewage. The palace had a tower whose two lower stories contained exclusively latrines. Fitted with stone seats, these were emptied into a pit below ground level that was flushed by water from the kitchen drains and by an underground stream diverted for the purpose. In the town, however, the stench caused the ambassador from Aragon to swoon, and Petrarch to move out to nearby Vaucluse “to prolong my life.”
More accessible than Rome, Avignon attracted visitors from all over Europe, and its flow of money helped to support artists, writers and scholars, masters of law and medicine, minstrels and poets. If corrupt, it was also Maecenas. Everybody scolded Avignon and everybody came there. St. Brigitta, a widowed Swedish