Rentseeking Bishops and Magistrates

The Church resorted to every conceivable expedient to squeeze more money out of its charges to feed its overgrown bureaucracy. Regions directly under the lordship of the Church were required to pay higher and higher taxes. In provinces and kingdoms where the Church lacked direct taxing power, the Vatican imposed “annates,” a payment to be made by the local sovereign in lieu of direct ecclesiastic taxes.
The Church, like the state today, also raided its own coffers, diverting funds from benefactions earmarked for specific uses to pay for general overhead expenses. Benefices and venal religious offices were openly sold, as were the income streams from tithes. In effect, the interests in tithes became the ecclesiastic equivalent of bonds issued by modern governments to finance their chronic deficits.
While the Church was the ideological defender of feudalism and critic of commerce and capitalism, like the nation-state today, it utilized every available marketing technique to optimize its own revenues. The Church operated a thriving business in the sale of sacramentals, including consecrated candles, palms blessed on Palm Sunday, “herbs blessed on the Feast of the Assumption, and especially the varieties of Holy Water.”² Like today’s politicians who threaten constituents with curtailed garbage pickup and other indignities if they decline to pay higher taxes, religious authorities in the fifteenth century were also prone to cutting off religious services to blackmail congregations into paying arbitrary fines. Often the fines were imposed for some petty offense done by a few persons who need not even have been members of the congregation in question. For example, in 1436, Bishop Jacques Du Chatelier, “a very ostentatious, grasping man,” closed the Church of the Innocents in Paris for twenty-two days, halting all religious services while waiting for an impossibly large fine to be paid by two beggars. The men had quarreled in the church and shed a few drops of blood, which the bishop claimed had deconsecrated the church. He would not allow anyone to use the church for weddings, burials, or the normal sacraments of the calendar until his fine was paid.

The Italian Stewes (to make the Pope good cheer)
payd twentie thousand Duckets in a yeere.
Besides they give a Priest (t’amend his fee)
the profit of a whore, or two or three.…
Methinkes it must be a bad Divintie
that with the Stewes hath such affinitie.³ —FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH BALLAD

The Siena orgy was famous, but it later proved to be tame compared to those Alexander threw after becoming pope. Perhaps the most lurid of those was the so-called Ballet of the Chestnuts, which involved Rome’s “fifty most beautiful whores” in a copulation contest with the Church Fathers and other important Romans. As William Manchester describes it, “Servants kept score of each man’s orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility.… After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes—cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times.”⁴/ Alexander fathered at least seven and perhaps eight illegitimate children

Jean Gerson, a leading fifteenth-century theologian, reports that “the most sacred festivals, even Christmas night,” were spent “in debauchery, playing at cards, swearing and blaspheming.” When admonished for these lapses, the common people “plead the example of the nobility and the clergy, who behave in like manner with impunity.”⁵

Belief in the efficacy of rites, rituals, and sacraments was so pervasive that it perhaps inevitably undercut the urgency of behaving in a virtuous way. For any sin or spiritual defect there was a remedy, a penance that would clear the slate, in what came to be a “mathematics of salvation.”⁶

Consciously, or not, the Church tended to make religious virtues of its own economic interests, while militating against the development of manufacturing and independent commercial wealth that were destined to destabilize the feudal system. Injunctions against “avarice,” for example, applied mainly to commercial transactions rather than feudal levies, and never to the sale of indulgences. .... It was rather a case of the Church as a predominant institution shaping moral, cultural, and legal constraints in ways that were closely fitted to the imperatives of feudalism.

Gunpowder weapons and improved shipping destabilized the military foundation of feudalism, even as new communications technology undermined its ideology. Among the elements that the new technology of printing helped reveal was the corruption of the Church, whose hierarchy as well as rank and file were already held in low regard by a society that paradoxically placed religion at the center of everything. It is a paradox with an obvious contemporary parallel in the disillusionment with politicians and bureaucrats, in a society that places politics at the center of everything.

A brief point of reflection to take away from this