Avignon Papacy

For most of the fourteenth century the popes governed the Catholic Church not from Rome but from Avignon, a town on the Rhône. Seven popes, all of them French, lived there between 1309 and 1376, and critics accused them of serving the interests of the French crown. Their absence from Rome, nicknamed the "Babylonian captivity" of the papacy, damaged the Church's prestige and led directly into the Western Schism, when rival popes competed for the loyalty of Christendom.

The move grew out of a bitter dispute between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip IV of France, who wanted to tax the French clergy to pay for his war with England. In the bull Unam sanctam of November 1302, Boniface asserted that every human being must be subject to the pope for salvation. Philip answered that in worldly matters he was no one's vassal. In September 1303, as the pope prepared to excommunicate the king, Philip's minister William of Nogaret and allies from the Colonna family seized Boniface at his home town of Anagni. Local people freed him after three days, but he died a few weeks later.

Boniface's successor, Benedict XI, died within eight months. After a long deadlock, the cardinals in 1305 chose the archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Got, a Gascon, who became Clement V. He never went to Rome, and in March 1309 he established his court at Avignon. The town lay outside the French kingdom, in the Kingdom of Arles within the Holy Roman Empire, and was surrounded by the papal territory of the Comtat Venaissin, but French royal influence there was strong. Clement gave way to Philip on several matters, most notably agreeing in 1312, at the Council of Vienne, to suppress the Knights Templar, whose wealth the king coveted.

At Avignon the papacy built an efficient central administration. Under Clement V and John XXII it took direct control of appointments to Church offices and collected a growing range of payments, including annates, the first year's income from a new post. The cardinals lived like princes, and the extravagance of popes such as Clement VI drew criticism. John XXII quarrelled with the emperor Louis IV and excommunicated the philosophers Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, both critics of papal power. Clement VI, pope during the Black Death of 1347 to 1350, bought the city of Avignon outright in 1348. As the Hundred Years' War unfolded, English observers increasingly saw the popes as partisans of France.

Meanwhile, papal control over Italy was slipping. After a papal ban on grain exports during the shortages of 1374 and 1375, Florence organised a league of cities against the papacy and fought the War of the Eight Saints, and the papal legate Robert of Geneva had much of the population of Cesena massacred, with between 2,500 and 3,500 deaths reported. Under pressure from these troubles, and urged on by Catherine of Siena, Gregory XI left Avignon on 13 September 1376 and reached Rome on 17 January 1377.

Gregory died in 1378. The Roman conclave elected an Italian, Urban VI, but French cardinals soon turned against him and chose Robert of Geneva as Clement VII, who returned to Avignon. This began the Western Schism, during which France backed the Avignon line and England the Roman one. The Catholic Church now regards Clement VII and his successors as antipopes. The last Avignon claimant, Benedict XIII, lost French support in 1398 and fled the city in 1403. The Council of Constance ended the schism with the election of Martin V in 1417. Avignon itself remained a papal possession until it was absorbed by revolutionary France in 1791.

Our 1300 map shows the Papal States in Italy and the Kingdom of France on the eve of the move, and the 1400 map shows Europe during the schism.