Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic Poverty Controversy (review)

During the 1320's a dramatic confrontation took place between Pope John XXII and leaders of the Franciscan order. In 1322, shortly after supporting those leaders in their struggle with the spiritual Franciscans, John traumatized them by reopening the question of whether Christ and his disciples had possessions, a matter inseparable from the question of whether the Franciscans themselves had possessions. (To state the matter thus is to oversimplify it, but in the context of a review it will have to suffice.) What was at stake was the question of whether the pope or the order owned everything used by the Franciscans, from the buildings they lived in right down to the eggs they consumed at dinner. The Franciscan claim to superiority over other orders was also at issue, since they felt their superiority lay in having renounced both individual and common possessions, as Christ had done.

After a period of debate, John decided that both Christ and the Franciscans had possessions. The dispute took on a political coloring in 1324 when Ludwig of Bavaria sided with the Franciscan minister general, Michael of Cesena. In 1328 Michael and others escaped from detention at the papal court and, under Ludwig's protection, busied themselves with hurling charges of heresy at John as well as recasting the history of the controversy in terms favorable to themselves. The result of the latter project was what scholars today call The Chronicle of Nicholas the Minorite.

In this Oxford doctoral thesis, Patrick Nold's primary focus is on Betrand de la Tour, O.F.M., whom John appointed as temporary minister general when Michael absconded. Nold utilizes a series of largely unpublished sources to show that, whereas Bertrand plays a very minor role in the debate over Franciscan poverty as portrayed by Nicholas the Minorite, his was actually an important voice in the ongoing discussion that led to John's decision. Nold does a great deal more than that, though. He sees how these sources can be manipulated to gain a chronology of how the discussion developed and a sense of how carefully John listened to it before acting. The result, for Nold (and for the reviewer), is a clearer notion of how John operated—as well as a more positive picture of John's character and theological abilities—than the one conveyed by Nicholas the Minorite.

In the process Nold perhaps overstates the differences between himself and other scholars, who are not as uniformly clueless as he sometimes seems to suggest. Even so, he has written a remarkably valuable book which shows us how much more we can learn about this period by taking advantage of the sources available to us.