Late Middle Ages

The Avignon Papacy and the Babylonish Captivity

The Avignon Papacy (1309–1376) is the name given to the period in which the seven popes of the Roman line — beginning with Clement V (1305–1314) and ending with Gregory XI (1370–1378) — resided not in Rome but in Avignon, a city in the Comtat Venaissin of Provence that was then a papal possession, on the left bank of the Rhône. The period is sometimes called the Babylonish Captivity of the papacy, in deliberate imitation of the Babylonian Captivity of the Jewish people described in the Old Testament, and the title was popularised by Francesco Petrarca in his letters De Roma and De vita solitaria of c. 1352. The Avignon Papacy was, in the institutional sense, a period of great centralisation of the church, the development of a sophisticated system of papal finance, the consolidation of the papal bureaucracy, and the elaboration of the canon law of the papal monarchy. The period was also, in the eyes of its critics, a period of worldliness, of political subjection to the French crown, and of financial exploitation of the Christian people. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and the historiography has been working out the relationship between them for the last generation.

The historiography is one of the great success stories of the modern historiography of the late medieval church. The older view — that of Ludwig von Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (16 vols, 1886–1933), translated into English as The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages — treated the Avignon Papacy as a period of papal decline, the prelude to the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. The revisionist view, of which the principal work is Yves Renouard, La papauté à Avignon (Paris, 1954), treated the Avignon Papacy as a period of institutional development, the creation of a modern system of papal government, and the prototype of the papal monarchy of the Renaissance. The current synthesis is Roland Saint-Jean, The Avignon Papacy: History and Memory (Brepols, 2016), and the older but still useful P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (Macmillan, 1968), and J. R. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton, 1980).

From Anagni to Avignon

The Avignon Papacy was the consequence of a long crisis in the relationship between the pope and the kings of France. The proximate cause was the conflict between Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) and King Philip IV of France (1285–1314). Boniface, who had been elected in 1294 after the resignation of Celestine V, was a Roman noble of the Caetani family, a canonist of the school of the Decretales of Gregory IX, and a pope of the plenitudo potestatis tradition of Innocent III and Innocent IV. In the bull Unam sanctam of 18 November 1302, Boniface declared that there was “one Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation,” that the pope was the vicar of Christ, and that “every creature must be subject to the pope.” The bull was a direct challenge to the king of France, who had been taxing the clergy of his kingdom without papal consent and was preparing to put on trial the bishop of Pamiers, Bernard Saisset, for treason.

Philip’s response was the famous “Outrage of Anagni” of 7 September 1303, in which William of Nogaret, the keeper of the seals, and Sciarra Colonna, a Roman noble in exile, entered the papal palace at Anagni and held the pope prisoner for two days. Boniface was rescued by the townspeople, but he died a month later, on 11 October 1303, at Rome. His successor, Benedict XI (1303–1304), reigned for less than a year and was succeeded, after a nine-month sede vacante dominated by the French cardinals, by Raymond Bertrand de Got, archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name Clement V and was crowned at Lyon on 14 November 1305. Clement was a Frenchman, a former student of the University of Bologna, a canonist, and a man of great political skill. He never went to Rome, and in 1309 he moved the papal court to Avignon, a city in Provence that was then part of the papal states, in the enclave of the Comtat Venaissin. The move was supposed to be temporary, but it became permanent, and the popes remained at Avignon for the next sixty-eight years.

The seven Avignon popes

The Avignon popes were, for the most part, French, and they were surrounded by French cardinals and French officials. The first of them, Clement V (1305–1314), was a relatively weak figure, and he was heavily dependent on the French king; his suppression of the Knights Templar at the Council of Vienne of 1311–1312 (the bull Vox in excelso of 22 March 1312 and the bull Ad providam of 2 May 1312) and his institution of the processus against the memory of Boniface VIII are the principal acts of his pontificate. John XXII (Jacques Duèse, 1316–1334) was a different kind of pope: a former bishop of Avignon, a former chancellor of the king of Naples, a former Dominican lector at Toulouse and Paris, a man of considerable administrative ability and considerable political ambition. He was pope for eighteen years, the longest reign since the first millennium, and he gave the papacy a sophisticated system of finance, the camera, the thesaurarius, the collectoriae, the servitia communia, the annatae — the principal instruments of the centralised papal monarchy. He was also a controversial theologian, the quaestio of the visio beatifica of 1331–34 (in which he argued, against the Dominicans and the majority of the theologians, that the souls of the blessed do not enjoy the visio beatifica until the Last Judgment), and he suppressed the Spiritual Franciscans in the bull Quia nonnunquam of 1310 and the constitution Exivi de paradiso of 1312, the occasion of the burning of the four Spiritual friars of Béziers in 1318.

The successors of John XXII were able popes and weak popes in succession. Benedict XII (1334–1342), a Cistercian, the third Avignon pope, tried to reform the curia and to return to Rome; he failed at both, and his bull Benedictus Deus of 1336 (the resolution of the visio beatifica question) is his most famous act. Clement VI (1342–1352), a Frenchman, a former archbishop of Sens and of Rouen, the fourth Avignon pope, bought the city of Avignon from the countess of Provence (Joanna I of Naples) in 1348, the year of the Black Death, and built the great papal palace of the Palais des Papes of 1335–64, the most impressive monument of the Avignon Papacy. Innocent VI (1352–1362), a Frenchman, a former bishop of Clermont, the fifth Avignon pope, presided over the Stabilimentum of 1360, the first systematic code of the papal court, and over the famous dispute with the emperor Charles IV. Urban V (1362–1370), a Frenchman, a former Benedictine, the sixth Avignon pope, tried to return to Rome in 1367, and the return was celebrated by Petrarch in his letters, but Urban went back to Avignon in 1370 and died there. Gregory XI (1370–1378), the seventh and last Avignon pope, a Frenchman, a nephew of Clement VI, finally succeeded in returning to Rome in January 1377, and the return was a major event of the late medieval church. Gregory died in March 1378, and the College of Cardinals, meeting in Rome, elected an Italian pope, Urban VI, in the hope of healing the breach with Italy — but the move to Rome did not end the crisis, and within months the French cardinals had withdrawn to Avignon and elected a rival pope, Clement VII, and the Western Schism had begun.

Centralisation and finance

The Avignon Papacy was, in the institutional sense, a period of great centralisation. The popes developed a sophisticated system of finance, of annates (the first year’s income of a benefice), of servitia communia (a tax paid by bishops and abbots at their consecration), of quindennia (a tenth of the clerical income levied every five years), of Peter’s Pence (the annual tribute of the English, the Hungarian, the Polish, the Scandinavian, and the Spanish churches), and of communia servitia (a regular tax on the religious orders). The papal court at Avignon was one of the most splendid in Europe, with a permanent staff of perhaps 200 officials, a college of cardinals that grew from 14 under Clement V to 24 under Gregory XI, and a camera that handled the flow of money.

The centralisation had a price. The most famous confrontation was the long dispute with the kings of England over the annates and the Peter’s Pence of the English church, which the king of England held to be a tax of the Crown, not a tax of the Pope, and which the kings of England refused to remit to Avignon; the dispute was the occasion of the Statute of Provisors of 1351 and the Statute of Praemunire of 1353, the first English statutes to limit the jurisdiction of the pope in England. The dispute was eventually settled by the Concordat of 1378 between the Roman pope and the English king, but the Statutes of 1351 and 1353 were not repealed, and they remained the principal legal basis of the English Reformation of the sixteenth century. The principal sources are the Calendars of Patent Rolls and the Close Rolls of the Public Record Office, and the Regesta of the Avignon popes in the Registra Vaticana and the Registra Lateranensia of the Vatican Archives.

The court and the culture of Avignon

The Avignon papacy produced a court culture of considerable scale, and it left a deep mark on the architecture, the art, and the music of Provence. The Palais des Papes of 1335–1364, built by John XXII and Benedict XII and enlarged by Clement VI and Innocent VI, is the largest Gothic building in Europe: a complex of two palaces, the Palais Vieux (1335–1342) of Benedict XII and the Palais Neuf (1342–1352) of Clement VI, with a total floor area of 15,000 m², with 25 rooms, with a chapel of St. John of 1335–1342, with a tribunal of 1342–1352, with a camera of 1352–1362, and with a thesauraria of 1362–1370. The principal sources are the Inventarium of 1364, the Comptes de la cour of 1340–1370, and the Registra Avenionensia of the Archives départementales of Vaucluse. The Palais is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1995), and the principal modern works are Yves Renouard, Le Palais des Papes d’Avignon (Caisse nationale des monuments historiques, 1965), and D. Cooper, The Avignon Papacy: Popes, Art, and Architecture (Frances Lincoln, 2010).

The court of Avignon was also a court of literature and learning. Petrarch spent much of his adult life at Avignon and was the principal figure of the Studium of the Curia. Matteo Palmieri of Pisa, Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo, Cola di Rienzo of Rome, and the humanistae of the Curia of Avignon were the principal figures of the Italian humanism of the period. The most famous of them was Petrarch himself, who was crowned poeta laureatus at the Capitolium of Rome on 8 April 1341, the first such coronation in the modern period, and who spent the next decades in the service of the Curia of Avignon. The principal modern treatment of the Curia of Avignon is R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (1969), and the older but still essential E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970).

The critics: Petrarch, Catherine of Siena, and the Spiritual Franciscans

The Avignon Papacy was the object of intense criticism. The most famous of the critics was Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), the Italian poet and humanist, who spent much of his adult life at the papal court at Avignon and who denounced the papacy in his letters and poems. The famous lines of the Canzoniere and the Trionfi (the “Avignonese hell, where the vicar of Christ is made a servant”) are the most quoted; the letters De Roma and De vita solitaria of c. 1352 are the most important. Petrarch’s critique was, in a sense, a literary critique, the exemplum of a humanist who saw the papacy as a worldly, French, and Avignonese institution that had lost its Roman character. The critique was taken up by Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), the Dominican tertiary of Siena, the mistica of the late medieval church, who wrote a long series of letters to Pope Gregory XI (the Epistolae of c. 1370–78) calling on the pope to return to Rome and to reform the church, and who visited Avignon in 1376 to deliver the letters in person. The Epistolae are the most important single document of the late medieval critique of the Avignon Papacy; the Dialogo of c. 1377–78 is the most important single work of the late medieval mystica of the church.

The critique of the Avignon Papacy was not only a literary and mystical critique. The Spiritual Franciscans of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the radical wing of the Franciscan order, had been persecuted by John XXII in the bull Exivi de paradiso of 1312 and in the burning of the four Spiritual friars of Béziers in 1318; the Conventual Franciscans, led by the magister generalis of the Provincia, had been the principal beneficiaries of the Avignon Papacy. The Spiritual critique was carried forward in the late fourteenth century by the Brethren of the Common Life of the Devotio Moderna and by the mystica of the Rhineland (Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, John Tauler), all of whom saw the Avignon Papacy as the institutional consequence of the worldliness of the late medieval church.

The return to Rome and the immediate aftermath

The pressure for the pope to return to Rome grew throughout the fourteenth century. The Romans, in particular, were eager to have the pope back in the Eternal City, and they sent a series of delegations to Avignon, including the famous embassy of 1367 led by the Emanuele Orsini. The Italian states, the Holy Roman Emperors, and the English kings all supported the call for a return to Rome. The mystics — Catherine of Siena, Bridget of Sweden (c. 1302–1373) — supported the call. The crisis of the Black Death, which reached Avignon in 1348 and killed perhaps half the population of the city, weakened the papal monarchy and intensified the call for a return.

In 1377, Pope Gregory XI, under intense pressure from the Romans and from the Catholic faithful, finally returned the papal court to Rome. Gregory died the following year, and the College of Cardinals, meeting in Rome, elected an Italian pope, Urban VI, in the hope of healing the breach with Italy. Yet the move to Rome did not end the crisis. Within months, the French cardinals had withdrawn to Avignon and elected a rival pope, Clement VII, and the Western Schism had begun. The principal account is the Vitae paparum Avenionensium of Stephen of Salagnac and the Chronicon pontificum of Bernard Guidonis. The standard modern treatment is Yves Renouard, La papauté à Avignon (1954), and the more recent Roland Saint-Jean, The Avignon Papacy: History and Memory (2016), and the older but still useful P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (1968), and J. R. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (1980).

References and further reading

  • Yves Renouard, La papauté à Avignon (Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).
  • Joseph R. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton University Press, 1980).
  • P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (Macmillan, 1968).
  • William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (University of California Press, 1968).
  • Diana Wood (ed.), The Avignon Papacy and the Great Western Schism (Manchester University Press, 2011).
  • Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).