The Pope and the Plague

One of the major events during the reign of Pope Clement VI (1291 – 6 December 1352) was not of his making. He had been pope for four years when plague landed on his shores in 1347, spreading throughout Europe and killing one-third to one-half of the population within a few years.

Clement believed the Plague was the result of God's wrath, but that did not mean he was willing to stand idly by and let the results speak for themselves. He consulted with astrologers for the physical cause and looked for ways to mitigate the effects. One of the team that proposed a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in 1341 as its origin was Johannes de Muris, who had been brought to Avignon by Clement in 1344 to aid in calendar reform. Another of Clement's advisors was his personal physician Guy de Chauliac, seen here bandaging the pope's leg (in a painting from 20th century artist Ernest Board).

The advice of his physicians was to surround himself with fire to fight off the plague-inducing vapors in the air; stories tell that he had two raging fireplaces on either side of him while he worked. He did not, however, just sit in his palace: he involved himself in supervising care of the dying and burials. There was so much death that cemeteries ran out of space. Clement consecrated the Rhône River—the entire 500-miles—so that bodies could be thrown in and it would be considered proper burial along its length in France and Switzerland.

Because there was condemnation of Jews for the Plague in some areas, he released two papal bulls on the subject, on 6 July and 26 September, condemning the violence against the Jews. The second stated that those blaming the Jews were seduced by the Devil, because:

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.

Six cardinals died in 1348. One of Clement's solutions was to make his nephew a cardinal, even though his nephew was only 18 years old! (Twenty-two years later he would become Pope Gregory XI.) Clement's favoritism was one of the ways he was distinctly different from his predecessor, Benedict. I want to talk about Clement's more "worldly" tendencies next time.