Propaganda for the Indulgence of Saintes

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PROPAGANDA FOR THE INDULGENCE

OF SAINTES

In the archive of the chapter of the Cathedral of Utrecht a fifteenth-century publication has survived which has so far escaped the attention of both incunabulists and historians.1 It is a folio of six unnumbered leaves, of which the first and the last, the second and the fifth, and the innermost ones, are attached to each other so that the item consists of three sheets folded together. The text is printed in Type 2: 104 G of Jacob Jacobsz van der Meer in Delft, in the variant C observed by W. and L. Hellinga in printed work from the beginning of 1483 until the spring of 1486. Three lines, on various pages, are set in his Type 3: 145 G, which means that the number of lines varies from 36 to 38 per page.2 There are no signatures or catchwords. The content is in three parts, as announced in the first five lines which serve as a heading. According to them the piece consists of two mandates from the bishop of Utrecht, David of Burgundy, followed by a list of modalities and tariffs connected with the indulgence of Saintes, a town north of Bordeaux. This situates the work in a group of publications produced by the same press which appeared on the occasion of the campaign for this indulgence in the northern part of the Low Countries. The indulgence of Saintes dates from as early as 1451, when the bishop of the French town received a plenary indulgence from Pope Nicholas v in order to rebuild his crumbling cathedral.3 Twenty-five years later Pope Sixtus iv, like his predecessors, confirmed the indulgence again for a period of ten years. In his bull Salvator noster4 of 3 August 1476 the conditions are given by which the faithful could

1 K. Heeringa, Inventaris van het archief van het Kapittel ten Dom (1929), p. 65, no. 484. 2 Wytze & Lotte Hellinga, The Fifteenth-Century Printing Types of the Low Countries, 2 vols. (Amsterdam 1965), hereafter cited as HPT, vol. 1, p. 35, Type 2 and p. 36, fig. 15; vol. 2, p. 399, and see Pl. 113.

Type 3: vol. 1, p. 35; vol. 2, p. 399 and Pl. 133. 3 Unless otherwise indicated the information about Peraudi is taken from Nikolaus Paulus, Geschichte des Ablasses im Mittelalter, vol. 3 (1923) and from id., ‘Raimund Peraudi als Ablasskommissar’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 21 (1900), pp. 645-82. Earlier literature is also listed there. 4 Paul Fredericq, Codex documentorum sacratissimarum indulgentiarum neerlandicarum (1922), no. 188, pp. 261-7. Also printed in the Summaria declaration, discussed below; cf. M.F.A.G. Campbell, Annales de la typographie néerlandaise au XVe siècle (La Haye 1874; Suppléments 1-4, 1878-90), hereafter cited as CA, no. 1565.

21 propaganda for the indulgence of saintes

acquire it. We see that it was then accorded exclusively to visitors of the church in question during Whitsun week. The bull contains two new elements, however, which are both of the utmost interest for the later history of indulgences. The first is the declaration that its effect extended to the souls of the deceased ‘per modum suffragii’, by means of intercession. The other was the appointment as indulgence commissioner of Peraudi. As a result the indulgence of Saintes grew from a local matter into a wide-ranging international operation. Peraudi was born in the bishopric of Saintes. He was about forty at the time of his appointment and had been deacon of the Cathedral chapter for some months. In the following years he would attract the attention of Louis xi. He was appointed court almoner by the king and, in that capacity, took part in a diplomatic mission to Rome, where he was nominated apostolic protonotary in April 1482. It appears from his later activities that this appointment entailed the duty to expand the radius of the indulgence preaching. The profits gained were no longer intended solely for the church in Saintes, but a half was also intended for the fight against the Turks. In practice this meant that it was placed at the disposal of the pope. Such an expansion made it possible to extend the campaign abroad, where the exclusive objective of rebuilding a French church would have aroused less interest than the defence against a generally feared enemy.5 In this same connection Sixtus iv issued the bull Non sine gravi on 4 August 1483 in which he again recommended the indulgence of Saintes and emphatically confirmed its propagation outside France.6 The decision to start in the Netherlands had probably already been made, and Peraudi could begin to organize the preaching, a task which would have entailed several months’ work for the commissioner and his assistants. Part of the preparation involved approaching a large number of ecclesiastical authorities and municipal governments in order to gain their essential collaboration. To begin with, an agreement had to be reached with the princes of the areas in question. It was customary for the ruler to receive part of the profits after deducting the costs and payments to the many people who had collaborated in one quality or another. As a rule this amounted to a quarter or a third of the net profits, and in

5 Paulus, op. cit. (n. 3: Geschichte), p. 212, and id., art. cit. (n. 3: Peraudi), p. 648, assumes that this extension already occurred in 1476. Yet this is most unlikely. He bases himself on a bull of Sixtus iv, the text of which is undated and appears in a work printed by Ulrich Zell, cf. E. Voulliéme, Der Buchdruck Kölns bis zum Ende des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts (Bonn 1903; repr. Düsseldorf 1978), hereafter cited as VK, no. 1091). The work in question, however, also contains the Confirmatio of the indulgence by Innocent viii and must thus be dated after 23 July 1485. See also W.A. Copinger, Supplement to Hain’s Repertorium bibliographicum, Part ii, 2 vols. (London 1898-1902), hereafter cited as C, no. 5519, and Einblattdrucke des xv. Jahrhunderts. Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis … (Halle a/S. 1940), hereafter cited as Einbl., no. 1366. 6 Fredericq, op. cit. (n. 4), no. 223, pp. 296-8.