Avignon Papacy
The Avignon Papacy (French: Papauté d'Avignon) was the period from 1309 to 1376 during which seven successive popes resided in Avignon (at the time within the Kingdom of Arles, part of the Holy Roman Empire; now part of France) rather than in Rome.[1] The situation arose from the conflict between the papacy and the French crown, culminating in the death of Pope Boniface VIII after his arrest and maltreatment by Philip IV of France. Following the subsequent death of Pope Benedict XI, Philip forced a deadlocked conclave to elect the French Clement V as pope in 1305. Clement refused to move to Rome, and in 1309 he moved his court to the papal enclave at Avignon, where it remained for the next 67 years. This absence from Rome is sometimes referred to as the "Babylonian captivity” of the Papacy.[2][3]
Papal States
Papal enclave and part of the Comtat Venaissin within France
Clement V (First)
Gregory XI (Last)
1309
1377
A total of seven popes reigned at Avignon, all French,[4][5] and all under the influence of the French Crown. In 1376, Gregory XI abandoned Avignon and moved his court to Rome, arriving in January 1377. After Gregory's death in 1378, deteriorating relations between his successor Urban VI and a faction of cardinals gave rise to the Western Schism. This started a second line of Avignon popes, subsequently regarded as illegitimate. The last Avignon antipope, Benedict XIII, lost most of his support in 1398, including that of France. After five years besieged by the French, he fled to Perpignan in 1403. The schism ended in 1417 at the Council of Constance.[6]
Among the popes who resided in Avignon, subsequent Catholic historiography grants legitimacy to these:
The two Avignon-based antipopes were:
Benedict XIII was succeeded by three antipopes, who had little or no public following, and were not resident at Avignon:
The period from 1378 to 1417, when there were rival claimants to the title of pope, is referred to as the "Western Schism" or "the great controversy of the antipopes" by some Catholic scholars and "the second great schism" by many secular and Protestant historians. Parties within the Catholic Church were divided in their allegiance among the various claimants to the office of pope. The Council of Constance finally resolved the controversy in 1417 when the election of Pope Martin V was accepted by all.
Avignon and the small enclave to the east (Comtat Venaissin) remained part of the Papal States until 1791 when, under pressure from French Revolutionaries, they were absorbed by the short-lived revolutionary Kingdom of France (1791–92), which, in turn, was abolished in favor of the French First Republic the following year.[7]
Papacy in the 14th century[edit]
Curia[edit]
After the arrest of the Bishop of Pamiers by Philip IV of France in 1301, Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Salvator Mundi, retracting all privileges granted to the French king by previous popes, and a few weeks later Ausculta fili with charges against the king, summoning him before a council to Rome. In a bold assertion of papal sovereignty, Boniface declared that "God has placed us over the Kings and Kingdoms."
In response, Philip wrote "Your venerable conceitedness may know, that we are nobody's vassal in temporal matters," and called for a meeting of the Estates General, a council of the lords of France, who had supported his position. The King of France issued charges of sodomy, simony, sorcery, and heresy against the pope and summoned him before the council. The pope's response was the strongest affirmation to date of papal sovereignty. In Unam sanctam (18 November 1302), he decreed that "it is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."
He was preparing a bull that would excommunicate the King of France and put the interdict over France when in September 1303, William Nogaret, the strongest critic of the papacy in the French inner circle, led a delegation to Rome, with intentionally loose orders by the king to bring the pope, if necessary by force, before a council to rule on the charges brought against him. Nogaret coordinated with the cardinals of the Colonna family, long-standing rivals against whom the pope had even preached a crusade earlier in his papacy. In 1303 French and Italian troops attacked the pope in Anagni, his home town, and arrested him. He was freed three days later by the population of Anagni. Boniface VIII, then 68 years of age, was deeply shattered by this attack on his own person and died a few weeks later.
Legacy[edit]
The period has been called the "Babylonian captivity" of the popes. When and where this term originated is uncertain although it may have sprung from Petrarch, who in a letter to a friend (1340–1353) written during his stay at Avignon, described Avignon of that time as the "Babylon of the west", referring to the worldly practices of the church hierarchy.[14] The nickname is polemical, in referring to the claim by critics that the prosperity of the church at that time was accompanied by a profound compromise of the papacy's spiritual integrity, especially in the alleged subordination of the powers of the Church to the ambitions of the French kings. As noted, the "captivity" of the popes at Avignon lasted about the same amount of time as the exile of the Jews in Babylon, making the analogy convenient and rhetorically potent. The Avignon papacy has been and is often today depicted as being totally dependent on the French kings, and sometimes as even being treacherous to its spiritual role and its heritage in Rome.
Almost a century and a half later, Protestant reformer Martin Luther wrote his treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), but he claimed it had nothing to do with the Western Schism or papacy in Avignon.
Effects on the papacy[edit]
The relationship between the papacy and France changed drastically over the course of the 14th century. Starting with open conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip IV of France, it turned to cooperation from 1305 to 1342, and finally to a papacy under strong influence by the French throne up to 1378. Such partisanship of the papacy was one of the reasons for the dropping esteem for the institution, which in turn was one of the reasons for the schism from 1378 to 1417.
In the period of the Schism, the power struggle in the papacy became a battlefield of the major powers, with France supporting the antipopes in Avignon and England supporting the popes in Rome. At the end of the century, still in the state of schism, the papacy had lost most of its direct political power, and the nation states of France and England were established as two of the main powers in Europe.