Avignon papacy

Avignon papacy, Roman Catholic papacy during the period 1309–77, when the popes took up residence at Avignon, France, instead of at Rome. The move represented a significant political victory for Philip IV of France in his long and, at times, violent conflict with the Roman papacy.

Although the Avignon papacy was overwhelmingly French in complexion (all seven of the popes during the period were French, as were 111 of the 134 cardinals created), it was not so responsive to French pressure as contemporaries assumed or as later critics insisted. During this time the Sacred College of Cardinals began to gain a stronger role in the government of the church; a vast reorganization and centralization of administrative offices and other agencies was effected; reform measures for the clergy were initiated; expanded missionary enterprises, which reached as far as China, were stimulated; university education was promoted; and numerous attempts were made by the popes to settle royal rivalries and to establish peace. Nevertheless, the antagonism, especially within England and Germany, to the residency at Avignon damaged the prestige of the papacy, and the so-called “Babylonian Captivity” of the Curia would lead directly to the Great Western Schism.

Clement V and the move to Avignon

Clement V was elected pope in June 1305, largely through the machinations of Philip IV, after the death of Benedict XI in July 1304. Clement chose Lyon to be the site of his coronation (November 1305), with a view to conciliate Philip, who was still pursuing a posthumous vendetta against Benedict’s predecessor, Boniface VIII. As such, Clement’s early papacy was spent undoing Boniface’s legacy in an attempt to appease Philip. From 1307 onward Philip also pursued the destruction of the Templars—quite possibly to gain control of the militant order’s vast wealth—and he eventually accused the knights of heresy. In 1308 Clement summoned a council to meet at Vienne, Dauphiné, in order to settle the issue. It was the prospect of this council that prompted Clement to select Avignon for his residence. He arrived there on March 9, 1309.

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Roman Catholicism: The Babylonian Captivity

Avignon, a possession of the Angevin counts of Provence and kings of Naples, stood on the Rhône adjacent to the Comtat-Venaissin, which had been in possession of the popes since 1274. Midway between France and Italy, on a great trade route, the town guarded the southernmost of the rare bridges over the Rhône, and it was reasonably near the sea. Avignon, indeed, was a more suitable center for church administration than Rome, if history was forgotten and the existing balance of power in Europe taken principally into account. Neither Rome nor Italy was safe for prolonged sojourn, and politically France now bulked largest.

In view of this French predominance, Clement V had at first supported the election of Henry of Luxembourg as German king (Henry VII) in 1308; but as the result of the Council of Vienne and French pressure in favor of Robert, the Angevin king of Naples, Clement came around to the anti-imperial side, of which the main organizer was Florence. Thus when, in 1313, Henry prepared for war against Robert, Clement threatened Henry with excommunication. With his ally Frederick III of Sicily, Henry might have conquered the Angevin had he not succumbed to fever in August 1313. Clement, claiming to rule while the empire was vacant, gave Robert the title of imperial vicar in Italy. Robert, however, spent his treasure and forces upon assaults on Sicily, lost control of the Romagna, and never made much impression in Lombardy, where the Visconti and the Scaligeri retained power in Milan and Verona, respectively.

Clement died in April 1314. An adroit but timid and physically ailing pontiff, he had been obliged to consent to the destruction of the Templars (whom he himself dissolved, so as not to leave their extinction to Philip IV) and to erase from the papal registers all apostolic letters against Philip IV and his agents. Only in the war of Ferrara (1309) against the Venetians did he have any success. He left a notable memorial of himself by adding the Clementinae to the existing body of canon law. He was a confirmed nepotist, with apparently a large secret treasure. His treated his private resources and the funds of the apostolic camera as a single unit, which he kept under the control of his family and on which he drew to make substantial presents to his relatives.

John XXII

Clement’s successor, elected after an interval of two years and three months, was John XXII, another French pope, who left a permanent mark on the later medieval papacy. Formerly chancellor of the Angevin Charles II of Naples, John touched the political and intellectual life of Europe at many points. He opposed the Spiritual Franciscans, a group who espoused an extreme version of the vows of austerity and poverty prescribed in the original Rule of St. Francis. In this, as in his doctrine of the Beatific Vision (the experience of God by the souls of the blessed in the afterlife), John aroused a great deal of theological antagonism and was unfortunate in having as his opponents such luminaries as Michael of Cesena (general of the Franciscan order) and William of Ockham.

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In 1322 John revoked the bull Exiit qui seminat (1279) of Nicholas III, which, by declaring the possessions of the Franciscans to be the property of the papacy, had enabled the order to claim total poverty while its “use” of the papal property was sanctioned. With the bull Cum inter nonnullos (1323), John declared the Franciscan doctrine that Jesus and his apostles lived in absolute poverty to be heretical. As a result Michael of Cesena, Ockham, and others took refuge with John’s enemy Louis IV the Bavarian. At Munich a new factory of antipapal argument and propaganda came into being, encouraged by the revolutionary thinking of Marsilius of Padua, who looked upon the church as the Pars sacerdotalis (“priestly department”) of the state. The intellectual attack on John was pressed by Ockham, whose polemical works are dominated by the thought that the papacy under John did not possess the magisterium in Christian teaching but was emitting views that were plainly heretical.

John entered into a fierce quarrel with the empire and began a long series of military and diplomatic actions in Italy to uproot Ghibellinism (the antipapal imperial party) and prepare the way for a return to Rome. At the imperial election of October 1314, five electors had chosen the Wittelsbach candidate Louis the Bavarian, while the remaining four voted for Frederick of Habsburg, duke of Austria. John, on becoming pope, viewed with alarm the possibility of a new imperial intervention in Italy, and he thought it safest to keep the empire vacant (as Clement had done) until he could decide the issue between the two claimants; meanwhile he maintained Robert of Naples as imperial vicar in Italy.

Louis the Bavarian’s victory over Frederick of Habsburg at Mühldorf (1322) was alarming to John, and his suspicions were confirmed by the fact that Louis sent a vicar to Italy to help the Ghibellines in Milan and Verona. In October 1323 John declared Louis guilty of acting as king of the Romans before his election was confirmed by the pope and of helping heretics by aiding the Visconti of Milan. Louis was ordered within three months to surrender his title, and his subjects were to renounce him under pain of excommunication and forfeiture. The German ruler retorted in January 1324 by declaring the independence of the empire and the sufficiency of his election and coronation to make him king of the Romans without papal approval. On March 23, 1324, John excommunicated Louis.

In the course of his Italian expedition (1327–30) Louis reached Rome and was crowned emperor by four lay syndics of the Roman people, headed by Sciarra Colonna. An antipope, Nicholas V (Pietro Rainalducci), was elected in May 1328, but the expedition achieved little else, since John continued to insist on the nullity of an election unconfirmed by the papacy. There would be no settlement of the quarrel while John was alive. After his death, indignation with his policy provoked the German princes to declare at Rense that the chosen of the electors was king of the Romans without need of papal confirmation (1338).

The pope found the Ghibellines of northern Italy no less intractable. The Visconti and the Scaligeri (Della Scala) remained unmoved by excommunication, and John had to send the warrior legate Bertrand du Pouget to resolve the situation. He also appealed to Philip V of France, who authorized Philip of Valois (the future Philip VI of France) to descend into Italy (1320). Philip, instead of fighting Galeazzo Visconti, parleyed with him. Later, Philip excused himself to the French king on the ground that neither John nor Robert of Anjou, who was pledged to help him, had sent him any money. The Visconti seized Vercelli (1321) and Cremona (1322), and the pope tried without success to tempt Frederick of Austria to rescue the position. Despite the Ghibelline recovery, the legate was successful in forming a Guelf (pro-papacy) nucleus in Parma, Modena, Reggio, and Bologna. It was suggested that a new north Italian kingdom might be constituted for John of Bohemia, Henry VII’s son, who in 1330 went to Italy to help the Brescians against Mastino della Scala. But the Italian powers took fright. Guelf and Ghibelline alike formed, in 1332, the League of Ferrara to expel the invader, and the papal and legatine forces were twice defeated in 1333, at Ferrara and at Argenta. John of Bohemia left Italy and the legate, against whom Bologna had revolted in 1334, had to make his escape to Avignon.

The 14 years of warfare had cost John XXII more than half the revenues of his pontificate, though he had at least asserted the power of the church in northern Italy, even if unsuccessfully. His general administration contributed substantially to the development of the papal bureaucracy. Under his rule the Roman Curia became fixed at Avignon. The episcopal palace where John lived was a powerfully defended fortress; the atmosphere of security guaranteed the untroubled working of the monarchical centralization.

Administration, finance, and development at Avignon

The Avignonese system, complicated as it grew to be, was founded upon two simple administrative acts: a petition to the pope and the papal reply, in the form of a grant of some license, dispensation, or favor in the shape of office or benefice. The recipient was willing (and obliged) to pay the fees laid down, both to the chancery and to other authorized agents. The most common form of petition was for the papal collation of a benefice, whether a canonry with or without a prebend or a “church” (i.e., parish church) or other emolument. But the issue of letters of provision did not necessarily imply that the petitioner got the benefice for which he asked. The executors of the provisions (generally clerks of the diocese named) might find that the benefice was already filled or that obstacles were encountered against which litigation had to be commenced.

At the same time the popes steadily increased the categories of reservations, from those benefices which fell vacant by their holders dying within a given distance of the Roman Curia. John XXII saw the need of advance by stages. In the constitution Ex debito of 1316 he extended reservation to several categories of benefices over and above those which were vacantes in curia (those of which the holder had died in Rome). The constitution Execrabilis (1317), forbidding a clerk to hold more than one living, placed in the hands of the Roman Curia the collation of the benefice that the pluralist clerk was forced to resign.

At Avignon the plenitude of power was asserted not so much politically as administratively, and petitioning became a skilled technique, for the system of granting benefices was regulated by the delicately adjusted rules of the apostolic chancery. The livings or offices, whether conferred in consistory (appointments in collegiate churches) or by ordinary process of assented petition, involved, in addition to the fees, payments to the apostolic camera and to the camera cardinalium, called servitia (“services”) and annates, respectively. The latter were paid on simple benefices; the higher benefices involved both the “great” and the “little” servitia. Gathered locally by papal collectors, the payments were frequently advanced by papal merchants who satisfied the needs of the pope and cardinals for ready money and retained the papal grant until they had secured from the grantee binding agreements to pay (obligationes), approved by the curia.

This development of papal finance and, in particular, the help of the mercatores domini Papae (“papal merchants”) enabled John XXII to finance his military enterprises in Italy. The chamberlain Gasbert de Laval (1319–47) acted both as administrator and diplomatic counselor and was responsible for many of these developments. The system of collectories, areas into which Christendom was divided for the collection of papal duties, was promoted by him; it did not, however, function until the middle of the 14th century.

In addition to the expansion of the chancery and of the exchequer and the growth of the papal palatium (law court), the papal penitentiary dealt with those ecclesiastical offenses, the absolution of which was reserved to the Holy See, and, through its local penitentiars, exercised the power of binding and loosing vested in the pope.

The whole edifice was kept together by the collaboration of the cardinals, who had come to be the pope’s sole counselors when seated with him in consistory. It was during the Avignonese period that the aristocratic theory of their necessary cooperation and consent in all major papal acts undoubtedly developed.

Benedict XII

On his death John XXII was succeeded by Benedict XII, a French theologian devoted to the reform of the religious orders. The bull Summi magistri (1336) dealt in its 39 chapters with all the main aspects of the religious life of the Order of St. Benedict, its government, the regime of the convents, its temporal possessions, and its studies. The pope was also much concerned to remedy abuses in the secular clergy. In view of his reforming activity, it is not surprising that Benedict was the object of calumny. He was accused of avarice, egoism, prejudice, dislike of the cardinals, and hatred of the mendicants.

Perhaps surprisingly, the reform-minded Benedict began work on a papal palace separate from the bishop’s residence at Avignon. No longer was the see of Avignon kept vacant and administered by the bishop of Marseilles. Around the court of the old episcopal palace he constructed a building that resembled both a monastery and a fortress, yet one suitable for the expanding curia. In 1339 he transferred to it the papal archives, which had been at Assisi since the pontificate of Benedict XI.

It was the French Benedictine Clement VI who, in June 1348, took the step of purchasing Avignon for 80,000 florins from Joan I of Naples. He also built on to Benedict’s palace a second that was less austere and more fitted to his grandiose conception of the papacy. Already in Benedict’s time Sienese artists, in particular Simone Martini, had been brought to decorate the churches at Avignon. Clement charged Matteo Giovannelli of Viterbo and Lippo Memmi with the decoration of chapels in the new palace and had his apartments lined with tapestries from the north. The galleries and halls were filled with ornaments and rich furniture, new plants and strange animals appeared in the gardens, and Hebrew manuscripts and translations from the Arabic were added to the library. The influence of humanism was making itself felt.

Clement VI and Innocent VI

Clement VI, a clearheaded, Renaissance type of pontiff, took office in 1342, and he was confronted by three problems: a crusade, the failure of the Florentine bankers, and the state of the Italian possessions of the Holy See. The Anglo-French struggle was likely to be long (it became the Hundred Years’ War) and hamper attempts to relieve the last Christian states left in the east, the kingdoms of Lesser Armenia and of Cyprus. Clement thought of the Crusade as the pope’s first duty and made himself responsible for an expedition that was successful in taking Smyrna (1344). Later, to Clement’s indignation, the Latins of the East traded the place for a precarious peace with the Turks and for guarantees against piracy.

Finance, because of the Florentine bankruptcies, was an acute problem. Clement had to look outside Florence for his bankers, and on certain occasions had to employ 11 banks to send his military commanders in Italy sums varying from 20,000 to 40,000 florins. But these were failures of mechanism rather than of revenue: The pontiff was able to lend the king of France no less than 600,000 florins from the secret account. All that could be got was needed to meet the situation in Italy. The papal territories in Romagna and the Marches were disputed by the noble Italian families, whereas the patrimony was menaced by Giovanni di Vico, the prefect of Rome. Clement’s nephew Astorge de Durfort was sent to reestablish the authority of the Holy See in the Romagna.

Clement was also concerned with Naples and with affairs in Rome. In Naples he strove to ensure that justice was done to Queen Joan, who was suspected of the murder of her husband, Andrew of Hungary. In Rome he at first supported (1343) the popular leader Cola di Rienzo in his attempt to create an orderly bourgeois state based upon the ancient Roman republic. After 1347 Cola’s plans went beyond the establishment of order and suppression of the nobles and displayed a dangerous revivalism embodying a federation of Italy in which all Italians must be Roman citizens, Clement became alarmed and refused more support.

The next pontificate, that of Innocent VI, saw the Italian campaigns of Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, the fighting cardinal who revived the papal state and made possible the return of the pope to Rome. Sent as legate to the Romagna and to the march of Ancona, he quickly dealt with Giovanni di Vico (1354) and reduced the whole patrimony and Umbria to order. In 1355 the Malatesta family surrendered and received back some of their dominions as papal vicars. The duchy of Spoleto and the march of Ancona were both recovered in 1355. In 1357 Cesena was captured. Further success was for the time undermined by the intrigues at Avignon of Bernabo Visconti, who was trying to secure Bologna. In 1363 Bernabo was defeated, but Urban V decided not to break up the Visconti state. Had he done so, the later threat of Visconti domination over the city-states of Tuscany and central Italy might have been avoided.

The return to Rome

The last two pontiffs in the undisputed Avignon line, Urban V, a French Benedictine, and Gregory XI, the last French pope, were neither politicians nor administrators but intellectuals. Both were men of great piety, and Urban was generally accounted an austere saint. It was he who took the decision, in 1365, to bring the curia back to Rome. He was greatly concerned to reunite the Eastern and Western churches and hoped to enter into conversations with the patriarch of Constantinople. He could not do this so well from Avignon as from Rome.

Leaving Avignon on April 30, 1367, and reaching Rome on October 16, Urban installed himself in the Vatican, but he did not remain there long. When the Anglo-French War flared up again, the pope thought it best to return to Avignon, where negotiations could be more easily undertaken with the warring kings. On September 27, 1370, Urban was back at Avignon. Gregory XI had reached the conclusion that, to conduct negotiations with the Eastern church and to maintain the papal territories, consolidation by Albornoz and residence at Rome were necessary. But by proposing this at a time when the apostolic treasury was almost empty, while a large proportion of the personnel of the papal civil service was southern French by origin, Gregory aroused a good deal of criticism.

He delayed his departure, however, while he tried to bring about a truce in the Anglo-French struggle and convert it into a definite peace. But events in the east, particularly the conquest of Lesser Armenia by the Mamluks (1375), were pressing. On top of these happenings came the attempt of Florence to organize a league against the pope and at the expense of papal territory. In the War of the Eight Saints (1375; named after the council of Florentine magistrates who conducted the campaign), Florence secured the revolt of Bologna and other papal towns. The ecclesiastical territories would have been lost had it not been for the vigorous action of Gregory and of his legate, Robert of Geneva (later the antipope Clement VII). The move to Rome in January 1377 was essentially sound and can even be said to have saved the papal state. Gregory, however, did not live to see the result.

Gregory died in 1378, and cardinals of the Sacred College selected a second pope, who assumed the vacant Avignon seat. This marked the onset of the Great Western Schism. A succession of such “antipopes” were selected, and the schism was not healed until 1417. The increased power and ambitions of the cardinals had led to the schism and the subsequent emergence of conciliarism, a theory that a general council of the church has greater authority than the pope and may, if necessary, depose him.