On the first day of story-telling in The Decameron, a theme was to be chosen for the narratives by the young, but somehow senior, Lady Pampinea – who was the main instigator of the whole project. However, she decided that everyone could choose their own topic on the first day – and four of the group of 10 tell stories that are about the failings of the church and the clergy.

Why would Boccaccio be so anti-clerical? He certainly was – many other stories in the Decameron touch on the theme. But from all available evidence, he was also a believing Christian. Well, he wasn’t alone. 

To be alive in Western Europe in the mid-14th century was, very largely, to be Christian. The Moors had been pushed back into the south of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Turks had not yet arrived at the gates of Constantinople. The Jews people, whilst prominent and commercially useful, were a tiny portion of the population. 

The Christians ruled, and it was not only your religion, and therefore your path to the afterlife, it also provided you with your idea of what was in the world (in philosophical terms, your ontology), how you understood the world (your epistemology), and how to behave in the world (your ethics). Whilst evidence-based learning was used, as it always has been, any broad “scientific” discoveries about how the world worked were seen as a revelation of God’s divine plan. The Christian faith was your key to the world. Galileo, in the 16th century and Darwin in the 19th came up against this. Newton, by contrast, in the 17th, saw his work as revelatory of God’s plan.

Today, any understanding of the physical world has shifted far from any religious explanation – the domination of epistemology by science is complete. We really do not accept an explanation of the physical world except through the lens of science, but science does not give us any ethics. We fly in an aeroplane – even fundamental religionists do – because we tacitly accept that empirical investigation can show us how the world works. But science does not tell us to behave well and queue at the customs counter: our epistemology has become detached from our ethics. In the Western Europe of the 14th century, it was not. The Christian faith provided you with all of your understanding of the wider world, and also how you should behave in it.

What then, when the clergy - the deliverers of this belief system, the officers of the One, True and Universal Church – what happens when they behave so badly as to be a common scandal and a running joke? In the 14th century, the Pope was not just the spiritual head of the church, he was also the temporal head of a considerable chunk of central Italy – the Papal States – rich agricultural lands contiguous with Rome itself. This created great tension in Rome, so much so, that the Pope decamped to French-controlled territory and in 1309 settled in Avignon, in Provence on the River Rhone.

Without going into detail about the intricate politics of western Europe in the mid-14th century, when the Pope was in Avignon, he was technically not in France, but he was definitely under the sway of the French crown – all the Popes of the 14th century were French. Clement VI was Pope at the time of the plague and his court was a byword for luxury, licentiousness and, worst of all, simony. (I shall explain.)

. . .

Luxury: Two years after the plague carried off his parents, an orphaned Italian boy of 15, Francesco de Marco Datini, arrived in Avignon to set up as a merchant. He was from Prato, a small wool-working town near Florence. He arrived with modest capital and limited contacts. He was rich by the time he was 20. That is how much money was washing through the water-gates of Avignon.

Licentiousness: All that needs to be said is that Pope Clement’s mistress was the Countess of Perigord, considered one of the most beautiful women in Christendom. This clerical disregard of celibacy went all the way down, and, whilst it may have been psychologically healthy for the participants, it did nothing for the respect of the clergy – or the institution of the church.

Simony: This particularly pernicious practice was the purchase of anything you wanted from the church, most particularly to be excused of your sins. And you really needed to be because, if not forgiven, you would burn in hell. “I’ve killed my neighbour” – 200 florins. “I’ve raped my wife’s maid” – 100. You get the idea. 

The less gullible (more sceptical?) could see the racket, of course, and it added enormously to the disrespect of the institution of the church. Eventually, simony was one of the greatly discredited practices that led to the Reformation, although but Erasmus, Luther and that great upheaval were all 150 years away down the track of time.

Does this have anything to do with today? In my opinion, yes. The great scandal of the church in the 14th century was that it was too concerned with its temporal affairs and not enough with its spiritual avocation. The money got in the way of the ministry. 

The great scandal of the Church in the 21st century is all to do with the sexual abuse of children. What is disturbing believers, and has just about destroyed the credibility of the church in Ireland, is that the pastoral role of the church – to help the victims – has been completely subsumed under the institutional reflex to defend the structure, the hierarchy and, dare I say it, the princes of the church. 

Those Princes are still arrayed in their purple and scarlet robes, largely unchanged since Boccaccio’s time. The merchant I mentioned earlier, Francesco Datini, eventually left Avignon and went back to his home town of Prato where a special, fine, woollen cloth, scarlet, was woven and dyed: a beautiful, rich red cloth reserved for the rich and, of course, for the higher ranks of the clergy.

Read more of the Van Diemen Decameron here, or submit a story to editor@fortysouth.com.au.

James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.