The Pope's Fire
You play Pope Clement VI
The Black Death is in your city. Do you run, and whom do you protect?
For almost forty years, the popes have lived at Avignon on the river Rhône, not in Rome. The current one, Clement VI, throws the best parties in Christendom.
Your first call · Avignon: half its people dead
Leave for your castle at ÉtoileStay in Avignon behind your fires
Sources
- Louis Heyligen (Ludovicus Sanctus), letter from Avignon to Bruges, 27 April 1348 (Breve Chronicon clerici anonymi), translated in F. A. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (1893), ch. 3: the two/three forms, the sick abandoned with food by the bed, the gavoti and their deaths, more than half of Avignon dead, 7,000 houses shut, the field near Our Lady of Miracles bought and consecrated, 11,000 buried there from 13 March, Marseille shut but for two small gates, plenary absolution mid-March, processions, men caught with powders burned for poisoning wells, nobody drinking from wells, the pope gone to the castle of 'Stella' near Valence, vacations proclaimed till Michaelmas, auditors and advocates gone or dead
- Guy de Chauliac, Chirurgia magna (1363), on the plague at Avignon, translated in Gasquet ch. 3: began January 1348, lasted seven months, two kinds (blood-spitting, death in three days; buboes in armpit or groin, five days), 'a father did not visit his son, nor the son his father. Charity was dead', 'to avoid infamy, I did not dare to absent myself, but still I was in continual fear', his own six-week illness; Gasquet on the pope isolated with fires on Chauliac's advice; the Vita prima of Clement VI (Baluze) on the field bought for a cemetery
- Jacob Twinger von Königshofen, Strasbourg chronicle (using Closener), trans. J. R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (Medieval Sourcebook): the pope at Avignon shut himself in a room with a fire burning before him; Jews burned from the Mediterranean into Germany 'but not in Avignon, for the pope protected them there'; Agimet's confession at Châtel, October 1348
- Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), 'Pope Clement VI': Pierre Roger; 'munificent to profusion... a lover of good cheer, well-appointed banquets and brilliant receptions'; purchase of Avignon from Joanna of Naples for 80,000 florins, 9 June 1348; bulls for the Jews and 'a refuge in his little State'
- Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents 492-1404 (PIMS 1988), nos. 372-374: no. 372, Avignon 5 July 1348, reissue of Sicut Judeis ('protectionis nostre clipeum impertimur'); no. 373, Avignon 26 September 1348, Quamvis perfidiam: recites the protection (no Christian to wound, kill or take Jews' money 'sine iudicio'), the plague blamed on Jews 'seducente dyabolo', the plague afflicting Jews 'et alias nationes plurimas, que cohabitationem Iudeorum eorundem non noverant', so the charge is implausible; prelates to forbid harm under pain of excommunication; no. 374, 1 October 1348, reissue
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, 'Toulon' (Jewish Virtual Library): on the night of 12/13 April 1348 (Palm Sunday) the Jewish street of Toulon was attacked, the houses pillaged and 40 Jews slain; the attackers fled an inquiry and were soon pardoned (primary record, Shatzmiller 1974, not online)
- J. F. C. Hecker, The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century (trans. Babington), chs. 7 and 9: Clement 'kept up constant fires, and suffered no one to approach him'; contemporary advice to purify the air with large fires; Report of the Paris Medical Faculty, October 1348 (trans. Horrox): the epidemic 'has arisen from air corrupt in its substance'
