During an entire year Rome swarmed with pilgrims and was filled with a perfect babel of tongues.  It was said that thirty thousand pilgrims entered and left the city daily, and that daily two hundred thousand pilgrims might have been found within it.  An exemplary administration provided for order and for moderate prices.  The year was fruitful, the Campagna and the neighboring provinces sent supplies in abundance.  One of the pilgrims who was a chronicler relates that “bread, wine, meat, fish, and oats were plentiful and cheap in the market; the hay, however, was very dear; the inns so expensive that I was obliged to pay for my bed and the stabling of my horse (beyond the hay and oats) a Tornese groat a day.  As I left Rome on Christmas eve, I saw so large a party of pilgrims depart that no one could count the number.  The Romans reckon that altogether they have had two millions of men and women.  I frequently saw both sexes trodden under foot, and it was sometimes with difficulty that I escaped the same fate myself.”

The way that led from the city across the bridge of St. Angelo to St. Peter’s was too narrow; a new street was therefore opened in the walls along the river, not far from the ancient tomb known as Meta Romuli.  The bridge was covered with booths, which divided it in two, and in order to prevent accidents it was enacted that those going to St. Peter’s should keep to one side of the bridge; those returning, to the other.  Processions went incessantly to St. Paul’s without the walls and to St. Peter’s, where the already renowned relic, the handkerchief of Veronica, was exhibited.  Every pilgrim laid an offering on the altar of the apostle, and the same chronicler of Asti assures us, as an eye-witness, that two clerics stood by the altar of St. Paul’s, day and night, who with rakes in their hands gathered in untold money.

The marvellous sight of priests, who smilingly shovelled up gold like hay, caused malicious Ghibellines to assert that the Pope had appointed the jubilee solely for the sake of gain.  Boniface in truth stood in need of money to defray the expenses of the war with Sicily, which swallowed up incalculable sums.  If instead of copper, the monks in St. Paul’s had lighted on gold florins, they would necessarily have collected fabulous wealth, but the heaps of money, both in St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, consisted mainly of small coins, the gifts of poor pilgrims.

Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi pointedly comments on the fact, and laments the change of times, when only the poor gave offerings, and when kings no longer, like the three magi, brought gifts to the Saviour.  The receipts of the jubilee, which the Pope was able to devote to the two basilicas for the purchase of estates, were sufficiently considerable.  If in ordinary years the gifts of pilgrims to St. Peter’s amounted to thirty thousand four hundred gold florins, we may conclude how much greater must have been the gains of the year of jubilee.  “The gifts of pilgrims,” wrote the chronicler of Florence, “yield treasures to the Church, and the Romans all grow wealthy by the sale of their goods.”