The Avignon Papacy and the Western Schism

At the start of the fourteenth century, Rome was a dangerous place for a pope. The great baronial families, above all the Colonna and the Orsini, fought for control of the city, and in 1303 agents of King Philip IV of France, with Colonna allies, had seized Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni. When the cardinals elected Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, in 1305, the new pope, Clement V, was crowned at Lyon and never went to Italy. He had urgent business north of the Alps: peace between France and England, a planned crusade, and Philip IV’s campaign against the Knights Templar, whose order Clement suppressed at the Council of Vienne in 1312.

In 1309 Clement settled at Avignon, a city on the Rhône belonging to the Angevin counts of Provence, beside the papal territory of the Comtat Venaissin. It was meant as a temporary base, but it lasted almost seventy years. Seven popes lived there in succession, all of them French, and in 1348 Clement VI bought the city outright from Queen Joanna I of Naples.

Avignon became a capital. Benedict XII and Clement VI built the vast Palace of the Popes, part fortress and part court. Bankers, lawyers, artists and petitioners crowded into the town. The papal administration grew more efficient than any in Europe, collecting taxes from clergy across Christendom and controlling appointments to many church offices.

Life at the papal court was not only bureaucratic. The popes patronised artists such as the Sienese painter Simone Martini, built up a great library and maintained a large household. When the Black Death struck Avignon in 1348, Clement VI stayed in the city, bought land for a new cemetery and condemned attacks on Jews, who were being blamed for the plague in many parts of Europe. Historians note that his bulls on the subject pointed out that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else.

To critics, this splendour was a scandal. The Italian poet Petrarch, who lived near Avignon for years, called the papal city a new Babylon, and the phrase ‘Babylonian Captivity of the Church’, an echo of the exile of the Jews, stuck. Italians resented the loss of the papacy, the English, at war with France from 1337, saw the popes as French partisans, and preachers attacked the wealth of the court. Historians today give a more balanced picture: the Avignon popes were influenced by France but not controlled by it, and some, such as Benedict XII, were serious reformers.

Pressure to return to Rome grew. Urban V went back in 1367 but returned to Avignon in 1370. The Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena and the Swedish visionary Bridget of Sweden urged the popes to go home, and the Papal States in Italy were slipping out of control. In January 1377 Gregory XI finally entered Rome. He died there in March 1378.

The conclave of April 1378 met in Rome under heavy pressure from crowds demanding a Roman, or at least an Italian, pope. The cardinals chose Bartolomeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, who took the name Urban VI. His harsh and erratic behaviour soon alienated them. That summer most of the cardinals withdrew, declared that the election had been made under fear and was invalid, and at Fondi in September elected Robert of Geneva as Clement VII. Clement eventually returned to Avignon.

Christendom divided along political lines. France, Scotland, Naples for a time, and in the end Castile, Aragon and Navarre supported Avignon; England, most of the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary and much of Italy supported Rome. Each pope had his own cardinals and successors, and each excommunicated the other’s followers. Saints and scholars were found on both sides, and ordinary believers could not be sure which pope was the true one.

University theologians, especially in Paris, proposed solutions: both popes might resign, or submit to arbitration, or a general council might judge between them. In 1409 cardinals from both obediences met at Pisa, deposed the Roman pope Gregory XII and the Avignon pope Benedict XIII, and elected Alexander V. Neither deposed pope accepted the verdict, so there were now three. Alexander’s successor, Baldassare Cossa, took the name John XXIII.

Under pressure from Sigismund, King of the Romans, John XXIII summoned a general council to Constance, on Lake Constance, which opened in November 1414. When it became clear that the council expected him to resign, John fled in March 1415. The council responded with the decree Haec Sancta, declaring that a general council held its authority directly from Christ, and in May it deposed him. In July the Roman pope Gregory XII formally convoked the council and then resigned. Benedict XIII refused to yield and was deposed in 1417; he withdrew to the fortress of Peñíscola on the Spanish coast and maintained his claim until his death, which most historians date to 1423.

On 11 November 1417 a special conclave of cardinals and representatives of the nations elected Oddone Colonna, who took the name Martin V. He was accepted almost everywhere, and the schism was over. The same council also condemned the Czech reformer Jan Hus, who had come under a safe-conduct from Sigismund and was burned in July 1415, a decision that sparked the Hussite wars in Bohemia.

The crisis left lasting marks. The idea that a council could stand above a pope, known as conciliarism, was debated for decades and later rejected by the papacy. The Catholic Church today counts the Roman line as legitimate, which is why a twentieth-century pope could take the name John XXIII in 1958. Critics of the papacy, from the Hussites to the Protestant reformers, remembered a Church that had once had three heads at the same time.