The Popes at Avignon

Boniface VIII (see Boniface VIII Issues Unam Sanctam) was followed by Benedict XI, who died at Perugia in July 1304. The cardinals, shut up there for more than nine months and divided into two parties, agreed to choose a man from beyond the Alps. In June 1305 they elected the archbishop of Bordeaux, who became Clement V. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani tells, as a thing done in secret, that Philip IV of France had met the archbishop beforehand and exacted promises. By this election, Villani writes, “the papacy reverted to foreigners, and the court went beyond the mountains” (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 8.80).

Villani speaks of the pope’s court at Avignon from 1308 (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 8.101–102) (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 9.8). Clement died in 1314 on the road to Bordeaux; Villani, no friend of the Gascon pope, calls him greedy for money and a simoniac (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 9.59). His successor John XXII, elected in 1316 after a vacancy of two years, had been bishop of Avignon (Giovanni Villani, Chronicle 9.81).

The poet Petrarch, living there, called the city “the Babylon of the West”. “Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee,” he wrote; “they have strangely forgotten their origin.” He described men loaded with gold and clad in purple, palaces and fortified heights, and parchments turned by a leaden seal into nets to catch Christians (Petrarch, Letters without a Name letter 5).

Catherine of Siena, a Dominican tertiary (Catherine of Siena, Letters editor’s table of Catherine’s life), wrote to Gregory XI in a different tone, as a daughter to a father. “Come, come, and resist no more the will of God that calls you,” she wrote; the vicar of Christ should rest in his own place, the seat of Peter (Catherine of Siena, Letters To Gregory XI (“Come, come”)). “Be manly in my sight, and not timorous.” He should return, raise the standard of the cross and give the church good priests (Catherine of Siena, Letters To Gregory XI (“Be manly”)). “Up, father, like a man!” (Catherine of Siena, Letters To Gregory XI (“Up, father”)). In 1376 Florence, then at war with the pope, sent her to Avignon as its envoy (Catherine of Siena, Letters editor’s table of Catherine’s life) (Catherine of Siena, Letters editor’s table of public events, 1376–1378).

Gregory returned to Italy and entered Rome in January 1377. He died in March 1378, and by September of that year the cardinals had declared the election of his successor invalid and chosen another pope (Catherine of Siena, Letters editor’s table of public events, 1376–1378); see the Great Western Schism.