Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/29

 PHILIP

PHILIP

wished his king to become master of the Papal States, to administer them, to reduce the castles and cities of this state to his obedience, and to force Tuscany, Sicily, England, and Aragon, vassal countries of the Holy See, to do homage to the King of France; in re- turn the king was to grant the pope the revenues of the Papal States. "It depends on the pope", wrote he in his work of 1302, "to rid himself of his worldly occupations and to preserve his revenues without having any trouble about them; if he does not wish to accept such an advantageous offer, he will incur uni- versal reproach for his cupidity, pride, and rash presumption." "Clement V", continued Dubois in his treatise " De recuperatione Terra^ Sancta"", "after having given up his temporal possessions to the King of France, would be protected against the miasma of Rome, and would hve long in good health, in his native land of France, where he would create a sufficient number of Frencli cardinals to preserve the papacy from the rapacious hands of the Romans." Dubois de- sired not only that the King of France should subjugate the papacy, but that the empire should be forced to cede to France the left bank of the Rhine, Pro- vence, Savoy, and all its rights in Liguria, Venice, and Lombardy. In 1308, after the death of the Emperor Albert I, he even thought of having the pope confer the imperial crown on the French Capets. He also devised plans for subjugating Spain. Thus re- organized by France Christian Europe was (in the mind of Pierre Dubois) to undertake the Cru- sade; the Holy Land would be re- conquered, and on the return, the Pala-ologi, who reigned at Con- stantinople, would be replaced by the Capetian, Charles of Valois, representing the rights of Cather- ine de Courtenay to the Latin Empire of Constantinople. The personal influence of Pierre Du- bois on Philip IV must not be ex- ^"' aggerated. Although all his writ- ings were presented to the king, Dubois never had an official place in Philip's council. However, there is an indisputable parallelism between his ideas and certain political mancpuvres of Philip IV. For instance on 9 June, 1308, Philip wrote to Henry of Carinthia, King of Bohemia, to propose Charles of Valois as a candidate for the crown of Germany; and on 11 June he sent three knights into Germany to offer money to the electors. This was fruitless labour, however, for Henry of Luxemburg was elected and Clement V, less subservient to the King of France than certain enemies of the papacy have said, hastened to confirm the election.

Universei

ued his proceedings against the Dominicans. Then Bernard D^Ucieux and some of the people of Carcas- sonne conspired to deliver the town into the hands of Prince Fernand, Infant of Majorca; PhiUp caused six- teen of the inhabitants to be hanged, and imposed a heavy fine on the town; and tliis conspiracy of Ber- nard Delicieux against the king and the Inquisition was one of the reasons of his condemnation later in 1318 to perpetual In Pace, or monastic imprisonment. Philip IV was not therefore in any way a systematic adversary of the inquisition. On the other hand, re- cently published documents show that he was sin- cerely attached to the idea of a Crusade. From the memoirs of Rabban Cauma, ambassador of Argoun, King of the Tatars, translated from the Syriac by Abbe Chabot, we learn that Philip said to Rabban in Sept., 1287: "If the Mongolians, who are not Chris- tians, fight to capture Jerusalem, we have much more reason to fight; if it be God's will, we will go with an army." And the news of the fall of Saint-Jean d' Acre (1291), which mduced so many provincial coun- cds to ex-press a desire for a new < rusade was certainly calculated to strengthen this resolution of the king. We have referred to Dubois's zeal for the conquest of the Holy Land; Nogaret was per- haps a still stronger advocate of the project; but in the plan which he outlined about 1310, the first step, according to him, was to place all the money of the Church of France in the king's hands.

The French Church under Philip IV displayed very little indepen- dence ; it was in reality enslaved to the royal will. Almost every year it contributed to the treasury with or without the pope's approval, a tenth and sometimes a fifth of its revenues; these pecuniary sacrifices were consented to by the clergy in the provincial councils, which in return asked certain concessions or favours of the king; but Philip's fiscal agents, if they met with resis- tance, laid down the principle that the king could by his own authority collect from all hia subjects, especially in case of necessity, whatever taxes he wished. His officers frequently harassed the clergy in a monstrous manner; and the documents by wMch Philip confirmed the immunities of the Church always contained subtle restrictions which enabled the king's agents to violate them.

A list of the gravamina of the Churches and the clerics, discussed at the Council of Vienne (1311), contains ample proof of the abuse of authority to which the Church was subjected, and the writer of the poem "Avisemens pour le roy Loys", composed in

THE t LEMISH C OMMI NES St\T

the cathedral of notre-d^ml .nd destro-ied in 1772 facsimile of \ Woodcut from Thevet's "Cosmographie

1575.

Philip IV was not really a free-thinker; he was re- 1315 for Louis X, exhorted this new king to live in ligious, and even made pilgrimages: his attitude to- peace with the Church, which Philip IV had not done.

To concentrate in his hands all the wealth of the French Church for the Crusade, and then to en- deavour to make an agreement with the papacy for the control and disposition of the income of the Universal Church, was the peculiar policy of Philip IV. Re- cently some verses have been discovered, written by a contemporary on a leaf of the register of the delibera- tions of Notre-Dame de Chartres, which reveal the impression produced by this policy on the minds of certain contemporaries:

Jam Petri navis titubat, racio quia clavis. Errat; rex, papa, facti sunt unica capa. Declarant, do, des, Pilatus et alter Herodes,

wards the inquisition is not that of a free-thinker, as is especially apparent in the trial of the Franciscan Ber- nard Delicieux. The latter brought the deputies of Carcassonne and Albi to Philip iV at Scnlis, to com- plain of the Dominican inquisitors of Languedoc; the result of his action was an ordinance of Philip putting the Dominican inquisitors under the control of the bishops. On the receipt of this news Languedoc be- came inflamed against the Dominicans; Bernard Deli- cieux in 1303 headed the movement in Carcassonne, and when in 1304 Pliili]) and the queen visited Tou- louse andCarcas.sonne, he organized tumultuous mani- festations. The king was displea.sed, and discontin-