Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Avignon Papacy

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 14th century, a bitter struggle with the French monarchy changed everything. For nearly 70 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. Comprehensive. Witty. Speculative. Critical.

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Starting point is 00:02:01 or wherever you listen to podcasts. The official title of the Pope is the Bishop of Rome. Yet for 68 years, from 1309 to 1377, seven consecutive popes govern the church not from Rome, but from Avignon France. To understand why the popes left Rome, it's 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 the 7th and Innocent III asserted that the pope was not simply the bishop of Rome, but the supreme authority within Western Christianity. This brought the papyr,

Starting point is 00:02:47 repeatedly into conflict with secular rulers. The famous investiture controversy of the 11th and 12 centuries concerned whether kings and emperors could appoint bishops. Later popes intervened in royal marriages, secession 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 increasingly centralized monarchy

Starting point is 00:03:34 and an increasingly centralized papacy. The immediate origins of the Avignon papacy lay in the struggle between King Philip V the 4th of France and Pope Boniface VIII. Philip the 4th, 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 nonetheless imposed financial demands on the French clergy. Boniface responded in 1296 with the papal bull clericius Lycos, which prohibited secular rulers from taxing clergy without papal approval.

Starting point is 00:04:25 Philip retaliated by restricting the export of money and valuables from France. Because large amounts of church revenue normally flowed from France towards 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 essay in 1301 and accused him of treason. Boniface insisted a bishop was subject to ecclesiastical rather than royal jurisdiction, and the dispute escalated rapidly. In 1302, Bonifus issued Unum Sanctum, one of the strongest statements of papal supremacy ever produced. It argued that

Starting point is 00:05:07 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 advice, and his advisors, this amounted to an unacceptable challenge to royal sovereignty. Philip's most important advisor in the confrontation was Guillaume de Nogare, a lawyer and royal official. De Nogare developed a remarkable case against Boniface, accusing the Pope of corruption, heresy, simony, and other crimes. Philip proposed calling a general counsel of the church to place Boniface on trial.

Starting point is 00:05:42 In return, Bonifis prepared to excommunicate Philip, but before he could, De Nogaray acted. In September 1303, De Nogore and a group of armed allies led by the Italian nobleman Sikara Colonia entered the town of Ananje, located southeast of Rome where Boniface was staying. They seized the Pope and held him prisoner. The episode became known as the outrage of Ananier. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:26 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 XIllifth, attempted to defuse the conflict, but he 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 Cardinal selected Bertrand de Gaunt, the Archbishop of Bordeaux,

Starting point is 00:07:03 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 the Fourth had not been especially close. Later stories claim that Clement secretly bargained with Philip to obtain the papacy, but historians generally treat the most dramatic versions of these stories with skepticism. Nonetheless, Clement quickly found himself operating under immense French political pressure. He did not travel to Rome for his coronation.

Starting point is 00:07:39 Instead, he was crowned in the city of Lyon in France. There were practical reasons to avoid Rome. The city was chronically unstable. Powerful aristocratic family, such as the Kelona 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.

Starting point is 00:08:11 That decision marks the traditional beginning of the Avignon papacy. Seven consecutive popes remain there for nearly seven decades. But why Avignon? Today, Avignon is in southern France, approximately 50 miles or 85 kilometers northwest of the city of Marseilles. 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 Comte-Venezan, however, was already under papal control. And this distinction is important. Describing the move as the Pope simply relocating to France is technically misleading. It certainly wasn't Rome, but it also was not quite France.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Evan Young was also near important trade routes and banking networks, making communication and finance relatively easy, at least compared to Rome. 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 formerly announced that Rome had permanently ceased to be the papal capital. His residence in Avignon initially resembled one of the many itinerant papal courts, which was common in the Middle Ages when popes traveled.

Starting point is 00:09:39 So at least at first, the move to Avignon probably didn't raise many eyebrows. What made the situation extraordinary was that his successors all stayed there. One of the most controversial episodes of Clement's reign demonstrated just 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 of 1307, Philip ordered the mass arrest of the war. of Templars throughout France. The knights were accused of heresy, blasphemy, sexual misconduct,

Starting point is 00:10:14 and various secret rituals. Many confessions were obtained through torture. Clement initially resisted Phillips' actions because the Templars were an international religious order, technically under papal authority. However, he eventually 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 the next two years arguing over his successor in a conclave which was held in Lyon.

Starting point is 00:10:50 Eventually in 1316, they elected Jacques Duet, who became Pope John the 22nd. 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 all across Europe. The Avignon popes increasingly centralized control over appointments to those positions. Ironically, one of the greatest achievements of the Evignon era was the professionalization of papal government. Thousands of petitions came to Evignon concerning church appointments,

Starting point is 00:11:35 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 all over the papal court, and 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

Starting point is 00:12:16 international institution. It continued dealing with England, the Holy Roman Empire, Italian city-states, 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 being a French puppet, but appearances mattered enormously. Evignon's physical transformation reflected the permanence of the papal residence. Pope Benedict X, elected in 1334, began construction of a massive fortified papal palace, which his successor, Clement VIII, expanded. The Palais de Pomp, or the Palace of the Pope,

Starting point is 00:12:54 became one of Europe's largest Gothic buildings, and today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Evignon 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 Florence, and it formerly became papal territory. And it would remain papal property for centuries, until Revolutionary France annexed it in 1791. And it should be stressed that at no time during the Avignon papacy were any of the popes forced to remain there. They chose to remain there, mostly because of bureaucratic inertia.

Starting point is 00:13:42 But as Avignon grew, problems emerged. The Pope wasn't 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. and Rome itself suffered political instability. By the mid-14th century, pressure to return to Rome was growing. The French monk, Guillaume de Grimoire, became Pope Urban I in 1362.

Starting point is 00:14:15 Urban genuinely wanted to return to Italy, and in 167, he left Avignon and actually entered Rome. However, the final Avignon Pope was Gregory the 11th, elected in 1370. Gregory faced worsening problems in Italy. 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, in which Florence helped organize resistance against papal power. The crisis strengthened the argument that the Pope could no longer govern Italy effectively from a location in southern France. Despite opposition for many French cardinals and pressure to remain

Starting point is 00:14:59 in Evignon, he left the city on. He left the city on. September 13, 1376. And on January 17, 1377, he made his formal entrance into the city of Rome, and the continuous residence of the 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. but the people of Rome were terrified that they might elect another French pope who would take the papacy right back to Avignon. A Roman crowd surrounded the conclave of 1378, which was held

Starting point is 00:15:42 in old St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and they demanded an Italian, and preferably, a Roman Pope. Under enormous pressure, the Cardinals elected Bartolomo Pregnano, the Archbishop of Bari, who became Pope Urban the 6th. His election sparked what became known as the Western Schism and a series of anti-popes who claimed the papal throne. But that'll be for another episode. The anti-popes were not the same as the Evignon popes, who were all considered legitimate popes, but they just didn't live in Rome. The Evignon papacy was far more than just 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 monarchs. By the time the papacy

Starting point is 00:16:27 returned permanently to Rome, it was more administratively sufficient. sophisticated than before, but its prestige had been deeply weakened, leaving a legacy that would shape the church for centuries. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast.

Starting point is 00:17:00 and links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Avignon Papacy

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