Cardinal Napoleone Orsini died during Lent of 1342, on 23 March. The funeral took place on Monday in Holy Week in the Franciscan church in Avignon, and the funeral sermon was preached by Cardinal Pierre Roger. A month later, on 25 April 1342, Pope Benedict XII died in the Papal Palace in Avignon. King Philip VI immediately sent his eldest son, Prince John, to press the candidacy of Pierre Roger, but he arrived too late to have any effect. Eighteen of the nineteen cardinals assembled for the
Conclave to elect his successor. Fourteen were French, three were Italian, one was Spanish. Only Cardinal Bertrand de Montfavez, who was ill with podagra (gout), was unable to attend. The Conclave began on Sunday, 5 May 1342, and on the morning of Tuesday, 7 May, agreement was reached. Two cardinals wrote to King Edward III of England on 8 May that the election had been accomplished "with no preliminary politicking and with only Divine Inspiration." Cardinal Pierre Roger was chosen to succeed Benedict XII as pope. He was crowned on Pentecost Sunday, 19 May, in the church of the Dominicans, the largest church in Avignon. Present were Prince John of France, Duke of Normandy; Jacques, Duke of Burgundy, Imbert, Dauphin of Vienne, and many others. Cardinal Roger chose the regnal name Clement VI. During the season of Pentecost immediately following his coronation, as Peter de Herenthal writes, when a new Pope customarily gratifies the expectations of his family, his followers, his supporters, his cardinals, and the Roman Curia, Pope Clement promised gifts to every cleric who presented himself at Avignon within two months. Such a multitude of poor clerics appeared in Avignon that a computation was made that the number of poor clerics in all the dioceses of the world was around 100,000, a number which Peter de Herenthal was quite prepared to accept. When Clement VI, at the very beginning of his pontificate was making reservations of abbacies and prelatures, and declaring elections in monasteries and Chapters void, in order to acquire benefices for papal use in granting favors, it was intimated to him that his predecessors had not engaged in reservations of such a sort. Clement is said to have replied, "Our predecessors did not know how to be pope."
New cardinals One of the greatest ways in which a pope can reward his supporters is to raise them to the cardinalate. On 20 September 1342, four months after his coronation, Clement VI held a Consistory for the creation of cardinals. He appointed ten prelates, including three nephews, Hugues Roger, Ademar Roberti and Bernard de la Tour d'Auvergne. He also elevated
Guy of Boulogne, the archbishop of Lyon and son of Count
Robert VII of Auvergne, and
Gerard de Daumar, the master-general of the Dominicans and a papal cousin, who died a year after his creation, on 27 September 1343. Five of his appointments were from his own native area of Limoges and one from Périgueux. Only one was Italian, Andrea Ghini Malpighi, a Florentine, who died on 2 June 1343. The College of Cardinals was now thoroughly French, with a strong accent of the Auvergne. On 19 May 1344 the two new cardinals who had died were replaced by two more Frenchmen: the Provençal
Pierre Bertrand, the nephew of Cardinal Pierre Bertrand; and
Nicolas de Besse, yet another papal nephew. reducing the interval between one Great Jubilee and the next from 100 years to 50 years. In the document he elaborated for the first time the power of the pope in the use of
indulgences. This document would later be used by Cardinal Cajetan in the examination of
Martin Luther and his
95 Theses in his trial at Augsburg in 1518. On 23 February 1343 Pope Clement appointed Pons Saturninus as his "Provisor of Works of the Palace", thereby beginning a program of construction and decoration that continued throughout his reign. It was immediately clear that the Pope had no intention of returning to Rome, and that he intended to provide offices and quarters for the various organs of the Roman Curia in the Palace. Pope Benedict XII, his predecessor, had built a palace, sufficiently accommodating for a Cistercian monk, but Pierre Roger had spent much of his career at the French Court and had imbibed its tastes for far greater display and ceremony. The Pope was, after all, a sovereign, and Clement intended to live and work in an appropriate state. He commissioned the new Tower of the Garde-Robe, the Audience (for the Auditors of the Rota), the new Papal Chapel and the grand staircase that led to it, and the Tour de la Gache (where the
Audientia contradictarum, the appellate court for countersuits, had its offices). He was also responsible for the two new entrance façades. He also purchased the sovereignty of
Avignon from Queen
Joan I of Naples in 1348 for the sum of 80,000 crowns.
The Black Death Clement VI was on the papal throne when the
Black Death first struck Europe in 1347. This
pandemic swept through Asia and the Middle East and into Europe between 1347 and 1350, and is believed to have killed between a third and two-thirds of
Europe's population. During the plague, Clement attributed the plague to divine wrath. But he also sought the opinions of astrologers for an explanation.
Johannes de Muris was among the team "of three who drew up a treatise explaining the plague of 1348 by the conjunction of
Saturn,
Jupiter, and
Mars in 1341" Clement VI's physicians advised him that surrounding himself with torches would block the plague. However, he soon became skeptical of this recommendation and stayed in Avignon supervising sick care, burials, and the pastoral care of the dying. He never contracted the disease, even though there was so much death around him that the cities ran out of ground for cemeteries, and he had to consecrate the entire Rhône River so that it could be considered holy ground and bodies could be thrown into it. Due to so many dying without access to priests, he granted a remission of sins to all who died of the plague. One of Pope Clement's physicians,
Gui de Chauliac, later wrote a book called the
Chirurgia magna (1363), in which he correctly distinguished between bubonic and pneumonic plague, based on his own observations of his patients and himself. Perhaps feeling the pressure of mortality, having lost no fewer than six cardinals in the year 1348 alone, Pope Clement VI named a new cardinal on 29 May 1348, his nephew and namesake,
Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who was not yet eighteen years old. On 17 December 1350, he added twelve more cardinals, nine of them French and only three from Limoges, including two relatives, Guillaume d'Aigrefeuille and Pierre de Cros. Suspicion fell on the Jews for the plague, and
pogroms erupted around Europe. Clement issued two
papal bulls in 1348 (6 July and 26 September), the latter named
Quamvis Perfidiam, which condemned the violence and said those who blamed the plague on the Jews had been "seduced by that liar, the Devil." He went on to emphasise that "It cannot be true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague, by the hidden judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them." He urged clergy to take action to protect Jews as he had done.
Pope and Empire Clement continued the struggle of his predecessors with
Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV. On 13 April 1346, after protracted negotiations, he excommunicated the Emperor, and directed the election of
Charles IV. After the death of Louis in October 1347 Charles received general recognition, ending the schism which had long divided Germany. In response to increasing Turkish piracy in the Aegean, Clement proclaimed a
crusade with the objective to recapture Smyrna which had been taken by the
Aydinids in 1317. The crusaders were able to capture Smyrna on 28 October 1344 which was held by Latin Christians until 1402. He also had a role in the
Hungarian invasion of the
Kingdom of Naples, which was a papal fief; the contest between
Louis I of Hungary and
Joanna I of Naples, accused of ordering the assassination of
her husband and the former's brother, concluded in 1348 in a trial held in Avignon, at which she was acquitted. Among the other benefits, Clement took advantage of the situation to obtain by her the rights over the city of
Avignon. and the Byzantine emperor,
John VI Kantakouzenos, turned out to be fruitless. In 1345 Clement sent a nuncio to King Casimir and King John of Bohemia, soliciting them to make peace between themselves, and threatening that, if they rejected his pleas, he would anathematize them and bar them from the sacraments. Responding to numerous complaints against the highhanded behavior of the
archbishop of Mainz, Prague's
metropolitan, Clement made Prague an archbishopric on 30 April 1344, and assigned the
Bishopric of Olomouc as its suffragan. The
archbishop of Prague acquired the right to crown the
king of Bohemia.
Private life Unlike the Cistercian Benedict XII, the Benedictine Clement VI was devoted to an openhanded and generous lifestyle, and the treasury which he inherited from his predecessor made that lifestyle possible. He claimed to have "lived as a sinner among sinners" in his own words. During his pontificate, he added a new chapel to the Papal Palace and dedicated it to
St. Peter. He
commissioned the artist
Matteo Giovanetti of
Viterbo to paint common hunting and fishing scenes on the walls of the existing papal chapels, and purchased enormous tapestries to decorate the stone walls. To bring good music to the celebrations, he recruited musicians from northern France, especially from
Liège, who cultivated the
Ars Nova style. He liked music so much that he kept composers and theorists close to him throughout his entire pontificate,
Philippe de Vitry being among the more famous. The first two payments he made after his coronation were to musicians.
Death, burial, and monument Clement had been ill for some time in 1352, not just with kidney stones, which had troubled him for many years, but also with a tumor, which broke out into an abscess with fever during his last week. Pope Clement VI died on 6 December 1352, in the eleventh year of his reign. After his death, his Almoner, Pierre de Froideville, distributed the sum of 400 livres to the poor of Avignon, and on the day of the solemn funeral another 40 livres were distributed during the procession to the Cathedral to the poor who were present. Clement left the reputation of "a fine gentleman, a prince munificent to profusion, a patron of the arts and learning, but no saint". His body was placed on exhibit in the
Notre Dame-des-Doms, where it was buried temporarily. Three months later, the body was transferred in a splendid procession to the abbey of
La Chaise-Dieu, passing through Le Puy on 6 April. On arrival, the coffin was placed in the church of the Carmelites. Later in April it was permanently interred in a tomb in the center of the Choir of the Church. The funeral procession was accompanied by his brother Count William Roger of Beaufort, and by the five cardinals who were his family members: Hugues Roger, Guillaume de la Jugié, Nicolas de Besse, Pierre Roger de Beaufort, and Guillaume d'Aigrefeuille. In 1562, the tomb was attacked by the Huguenots and severely damaged, losing the forty-four statues of Clement's relatives which surrounded the sarcophagus. Only the sarcophagus and tomb cover survived, making the present tomb a mere shadow of its former architectural and decorative glory. The tomb cover, in white marble, was made by master sculptor Pierre Boye, and his two assistants Jean de Sanholis and Jean David. The construction of the tomb began in 1346, and was completed in 1351. It cost 3,500
florins, to which were added 120
écus d'or, as a gratuity for the master sculptor. ==See also==