Clement's Preferences

Clement VI (1291 - 1352) was a different pope from some of his predecessors. One of his first acts was to promise gifts to every cleric who came to Avignon to present himself to the pope in the first two months of his papacy. This attempt, apparently, to buy loyalty, along with Clement's move to reserve appointing abbots so that he could use the appointments as favors, was justified by saying "Our predecessors did not know how to be pope." (Incidentally, so many clerics appeared in Avignon that the estimate was made that the number of clerics in all the parishes of the world was around 100,000.)

His favoritism did not stop there. A mere four months after his election, he created several new cardinals, three of whom were his nephews. During his reign, he created cardinals of nine relatives. This practice of promoting a pope's relatives gave rise to the term "cardinal nephew." It was fairly standard practice, although his predecessor only created one and his successor only three.

Unlike Benedict before him, Clement had no intention of leaving France for Rome, and set about on a building campaign to expand the Avignon papal complex. Benedict had built a palace—the Palais de Papes—that suited his tastes as a Cistercian. Clement, however, was accustomed to more grand living, and added extensively and opulently to it. A new chapel dedicated to Saint-Martial was attached to the Palais and filled with hunting and fishing scenes—more suited to a king's decor than a pope's—and he had large tapestries installed.

Fortunately for him, Benedict's organizational skills and less-extravagant lifestyle left Clement with a large treasury with which to carry out his plans of elegance. He hired composers and musicians of the Ars Nova style to always be around, including Philippe de Vitry.

Clement died on 6 December 1352, aged about 60. He had suffered from kidney stones for many years. At the end, a tumor broke out into an abscess and fever, and he died within a week. His elaborate tomb (see above) was surrounded by 44 statues of his relatives; he had planned it himself and commissioned the sculptor; it was ready prior to his death. (In 1562, Huguenots destroyed the 44 statues.) Historians agree that Clement may have been a good pope in many ways, but he was not a holy person.

The artist who decorated Clement's new chapel was Matteo Giovannetti. He did quite a lot of work for Clement, and stuck around after that. I'll tell you more about him and his papal projects tomorrow.