Avignon Papacy

The move grew out of the clash between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip IV of France, which ended in 1303 with the pope’s seizure by Philip’s agents at Anagni and his death a few weeks later. In 1305 a deadlocked conclave, under French pressure, elected the archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Got, as Clement V. He never went to Rome, and in 1309 he settled the curia at Avignon — a city that did not yet belong to France but to the Angevin counts of Provence — while himself lodging as a guest of the Dominican friars. He yielded to Philip on several fronts, allowing the proceedings against the Knights Templar and abolishing their order.

Under his successors Avignon became the administrative capital of the Latin Church. The curia extended its control over appointments to bishoprics and abbeys and its revenues from fees and taxes, which strengthened the papacy as an institution but damaged its moral authority. Benedict XII (1334–1342) began the fortified Palace of the Popes, which his successors enlarged until 1364 into one of the largest Gothic buildings of medieval Europe, and in 1348 Clement VI bought the city itself from the Angevins. The popes tried to mediate between England and France in the Hundred Years’ War, but their ties with the French court made the English distrust them.

Urban V went back to Rome in 1367 but returned to Avignon in 1370. His successor Gregory XI, fearing the loss of the Papal States in a war with Florence and urged by Catherine of Siena, left Avignon on 13 September 1376 and entered Rome on 17 January 1377. Some historians stress that the period was less a captivity than a close cooperation between the popes and the French crown. The return did not last: the death of Gregory XI in 1378 opened the Western Schism, and Avignon again became the seat of rival popes until 1403.