Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
For centuries, the pope was one of Europe’s most powerful figures, ruling the Church from Rome and challenging kings and emperors alike.
Then, in the early 14th century, a bitter struggle with the French monarchy changed everything.
For nearly seventy years, the center of Western Christianity shifted away from Rome, creating a wealthy new papal court and a crisis of legitimacy that would outlast it.
Learn more about the Avignon Papacy on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The official title of the pope is the Bishop of Rome. Yet for 68 years, from 1309 until 1377, seven successive popes governed the Church not from Rome but from Avignon, France.
To understand why the popes left Rome, it is necessary to understand how powerful the papacy had become during the preceding two centuries.
During the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, a series of reforming popes had dramatically expanded papal authority. Popes such as Gregory VII and Innocent III asserted that the pope was not simply the bishop of Rome but the supreme authority within Western Christianity.
This brought the papacy repeatedly into conflict with secular rulers. The famous Investiture Controversy of the 11th and 12th centuries concerned whether kings and emperors could appoint bishops. Later popes intervened in royal marriages, succession disputes, wars, crusades, and the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire.
The high point of medieval papal political authority probably came under Innocent III, who reigned from 1198 to 1216. By the end of the 13th century, however, the political environment was changing.
Europe’s monarchies were becoming stronger. Kings were developing permanent bureaucracies, more sophisticated systems of taxation, and increasingly centralized governments.
The conflict that triggered the Avignon era would come from the collision between this increasingly centralized monarchy and an increasingly centralized papacy.
The immediate origins of the Avignon Papacy lay in the struggle between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII.
Philip IV, commonly known as Philip the Fair, became king of France in 1285. He was an ambitious monarch trying to strengthen royal authority and finance expensive wars, particularly against England and Flanders.
One obvious source of revenue was the Church’s enormous wealth. Traditionally, rulers were not supposed to tax clergy without papal authorization. Philip nevertheless imposed financial demands on the French clergy.
Boniface VIII responded in 1296 with the papal bull Clericis laicos, which prohibited secular rulers from taxing clergy without papal approval.
Philip retaliated by restricting the export of money and valuables from France. Because large amounts of Church revenue normally flowed from France toward the papal court, this placed significant financial pressure on Boniface.
The two sides temporarily compromised, but their fundamental disagreement remained.
A second confrontation arose when Philip arrested the French bishop Bernard Saisset in 1301 and accused him of treason. Boniface insisted that a bishop was subject to ecclesiastical rather than royal jurisdiction.
The dispute escalated rapidly.
In 1302, Boniface issued Unam sanctam, one of the strongest statements of papal supremacy ever produced. It argued that spiritual authority was superior to temporal authority and famously declared that submission to the Roman pontiff was necessary for salvation.
For Philip IV and his advisers, this amounted to an unacceptable challenge to royal sovereignty.
Philip’s most important adviser in the confrontation was Guillaume de Nogaret, a lawyer and royal official.
Nogaret developed a remarkable case against Boniface, accusing the pope of corruption, heresy, simony, and other crimes. Philip proposed calling a general council of the Church to place Boniface.
Boniface prepared to excommunicate Philip.
Before he could, Nogaret acted.
In September 1303, Nogaret and a group of armed allies led by the Italian nobleman Sciarra Colonna entered the town of Anagni, located southeast of Rome, where Boniface was staying. They seized the pope and held him prisoner.
The episode became known as the Outrage of Anagni.
Local residents eventually freed Boniface, but the elderly pope had been humiliated and possibly physically abused. He returned to Rome and died about a month later.
The incident represented an extraordinary reversal in relations between kings and popes. Only a century earlier, Pope Innocent III had exercised tremendous influence over Europe’s monarchs. Now agents of the French king had physically seized the pope.
Boniface’s short-lived successor, Benedict XI, attempted to defuse the conflict but died in 1304 after less than a year in office.
The resulting papal election would change the geographic center of Western Christianity.
The conclave following Benedict’s death became deadlocked between competing factions.
After almost a year of debate, the cardinals selected Bertrand de Got, the archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name Clement V in 1305.
Clement was culturally French, although Bordeaux was politically connected with the English crown through the Duchy of Aquitaine. Before becoming pope, his relationship with Philip IV had not been especially close.
Later stories claimed that Clement secretly bargained with Philip to obtain the papacy, but historians generally treat the most dramatic versions of those stories with skepticism.
Nevertheless, Clement quickly found himself operating under immense French political pressure.
He did not travel to Rome for his coronation. Instead, he was crowned at Lyon, in France.
There were practical reasons to avoid Rome. The city was chronically unstable. Powerful aristocratic families such as the Colonna and Orsini competed violently for influence. Much of the Papal States was difficult to govern, and factional warfare could make Rome dangerous even for a pope.
Clement initially traveled around southern France rather than establishing a permanent residence.
Then, in 1309, he settled his court at Avignon.
That decision marks the traditional beginning of the Avignon Papacy. Seven successive popes remained there for nearly seven decades.
But why Avignon?
Today, Avignon is in southern France, approximately 50 miles or 85 kilometers northwest of Marseille. At the time, however, it was technically not part of the Kingdom of France, although it was close.
At the beginning of the Avignon period, the city belonged to the counts of Provence. The surrounding territory of the Comtat Venaissin, however, was already under papal control.
This distinction is important. Describing the move as the pope simply relocating to “France” is technically misleading. It certainly wasn’t Rome, but it was also not quite France.
Avignon was also near important trade routes and banking networks, making communication and finance relatively easy.
Southern France was much more stable than Rome, and Clement had political business nearby. Among other things, he planned a major Church council in the town of Vienne south of Lyon, which eventually met from 1311 to 1312.
There was probably no moment in 1309 when Clement formally announced that Rome had permanently ceased to be the papal capital. His residence in Avignon initially resembled one of the itinerant papal courts, which was common in the Middle Ages when popes travelled.
So, at least at first, the move to Avignon didn’t raise many eyebrows.
What made the situation extraordinary was that his successors stayed.
One of the most controversial episodes of Clement’s reign demonstrated how vulnerable the papacy had become to French pressure.
Philip IV owed enormous sums of money to the Knights Templar, the military religious order founded during the Crusades. In October 1307, Philip ordered the mass arrest of Templars throughout France.
The knights were accused of heresy, blasphemy, sexual misconduct, and various secret rituals.
Many confessions were obtained through torture.
Clement initially resisted Philip’s actions because the Templars were an international religious order technically under papal authority.
Eventually, however, he yielded.
The destruction of the Templars became one of the strongest pieces of evidence for later critics who claimed that the Avignon papacy had become subservient to France.
Clement V died in 1314.
The cardinals then spent more than two years arguing over his successor in a conclave which was held in Lyon. Eventually, in 1316, they elected Jacques Duèze, who became Pope John XXII.
John made Avignon a genuine center of papal government. He was an energetic administrator and a key architect of the bureaucratic papacy that developed during the 14th century.
The medieval Church controlled enormous resources. Bishops, abbots, monasteries, cathedrals, and other ecclesiastical institutions held land and received income across Europe.
The Avignon popes increasingly centralized control over appointments to these positions.
Ironically, one of the great achievements of the Avignon era was the professionalization of papal government.
Thousands of petitions came to Avignon concerning Church appointments, marriage dispensations, legal appeals, property disputes, clerical discipline, and other matters.
The papal chancery produced enormous quantities of documents. Canon lawyers, notaries, accountants, scribes, diplomats, and financial officers worked around the papal court. Records became more systematic.
All seven Avignon popes were French.
Moreover, the Avignon popes appointed many French cardinals. Because cardinals elected subsequent popes, this created a self-reinforcing system. French cardinals repeatedly elected French popes who then appointed additional French cardinals.
The papacy nevertheless remained an international institution. It continued dealing with England, the Holy Roman Empire, Italian city-states, Iberian kingdoms, and rulers throughout Europe.
Relations between the Avignon papacy and the French monarchy were often contentious, so you can’t really describe every Avignon pope as a French puppet. But appearances mattered enormously.
Avignon’s physical transformation reflected the permanence of the papal residence.
Pope Benedict XII, elected in 1334, began construction of a massive fortified papal palace, which his successor, Clement VI, expanded.
The Palais des Papes became one of Europe’s largest Gothic buildings, and today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Avignon became an international capital with diplomats, bankers, artists, clerics, merchants, and scholars arriving from across Europe, and the city grew dramatically.
In 1348, Clement VI purchased Avignon itself from Joanna I, Queen of Naples and Countess of Provence, for 80,000 florins, and it formally became papal territory.
It would remain papal property for centuries, until revolutionary France annexed it in 1791.
It should be stressed that at no time during the Avignon Papacy were any of the popes forced to remain there. They chose it mostly because of bureaucratic inertia.
As Avignon grew, problems emerged. The pope was not merely a spiritual leader. He was also a secular ruler whose Papal States stretched across much of central Italy.
From Avignon, these territories became increasingly difficult to control. Local nobles and city governments asserted greater independence. Rome itself suffered political instability.
By the mid-14th century, pressure to return to Rome was growing. The French monk Guillaume de Grimoard became Pope Urban V in 1362.
Urban genuinely wanted to return to Italy, and in 1367 he left Avignon and entered Rome.
The final Avignon pope was Gregory XI, elected in 1370.
Gregory faced worsening problems in Italy. Papal representatives, many of whom were French, were deeply unpopular, and Italian cities increasingly resisted papal authority.
The most serious confrontation was the War of the Eight Saints, which began in 1375 and in which Florence helped organize resistance against papal power.
The crisis strengthened the argument that the pope could no longer govern Italy effectively from southern France.
Despite opposition from many French cardinals and pressure to remain in Avignon, he left the city on September 13, 1376.
On January 17, 1377, he made his formal entrance into the city, and the continuous residence of legitimate popes in Avignon ended.
He apparently considered returning to Avignon, but he never had the opportunity, as he died in Rome on March 27, 1378.
His death exposed a dangerous consequence of almost 70 years in Avignon.
Most of the cardinals who would elect his successor were French.
The people of Rome were terrified they might elect another French pope who would take the papacy straight back to Avignon.
A Roman crowd surrounded the conclave of 1378, which was held in Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and demanded an Italian, preferably a Roman, pope. Under enormous pressure, the cardinals elected Bartolomeo Prignano, the archbishop of Bari, who became Pope Urban VI.
His election sparked what became known as the Western Schism and a series of anti-popes who claimed the Papal throne, but that will be for another episode. The anti-popes were not the same as the Avignon Popes, who are all considered legitimate popes, but just didn’t live in Rome.
The Avignon Papacy was far more than a temporary relocation of the pope from Rome to southern France. It reflected a major shift in the balance of power between the Church and Europe’s increasingly powerful monarchies.
By the time the papacy returned permanently to Rome, it was more administratively sophisticated than before, but its prestige had been deeply weakened, leaving a legacy that would shape the Church for centuries.