Tony Gersick
Rough Draft for Peer Review
Dr. MacEwan
10 April 2016
The fourteenth century proved to be a traumatic century for the Catholic Church. Starting in the 1290’s the relationship between the King of France, Philip IV, and the Papacy was dissolving due to the attempts by the French crown to control the clergy in France. The French crown achieved its goal with the influencing and persuasion of the papacy to settle in the French city of Avignon and election of a new French pope. Throughout the fourteenth, and into the fifteenth century, the French crown and the church influenced each other in many significant decision making moments that brought historical changes upon both parties.
The Papacy settling in Avignon was a result of Philip the Fair’s problem with the pontificate of Boniface VIII and was the onset of French secular involvement in the church. When Philip gained power at the tender age of 17 he was determined to strengthen the monarchy any ways possible. He wanted to change France to the most powerful centralized state in Europe being a feudal country. This meant that the crown had to be the dominant authoritative presence in France, and throughout Philip’s early quest to achieve this dominance he was constantly detested by the Papacy. Pope Boniface VIII was elected 1294 after his predecessor, Celestine V, abruptly resigned as pope. Once elected Boniface brought the Papal Curia back to Rome after Celestine V put the papal court under the patronage of the king of Sicily. Boniface had the same aspirations as Philip IV, wanting to keep the church as the dominant authoritative figure in Europe. The reason for the quarrels between papal centralization and royal centralization explains the conflict between Boniface and the king of France, who was at once the most powerful king in the West and the furthest advanced towards absolutism. Philip desired to have absolute power among the French people including the clergy. When Philip the Fair tried to raise taxation on the French clergy without consulting the pope for permission to do so, Boniface VIII reacted and issued a papal bull. The Bull Clericis Laicos was an attempt to prevent the French crown from, as well England, to take church revenues without papal consent.
“Emperors, kings, or princes by whatever name they are called, whether of cities, castles, or any places whatever, shall impose, exact, or receive such payments, or shall any where arrest, seize, or presume to take possessions of the belongings of the church or ecclesiastical persons… The prelates and above mentioned [as] ecclesiastical person we strictly command, by virtue of their obedience and under penalty of deposition, that they by no means acquiesce in such demands without expressed permission of the aforesaid chair; and that they pay nothing under pretext of any obligation, premise, and confession made hitherto, or to be made hereafter.”
This outraged Philip IV and reacted by cutting off the papal states from receiving precious metals such as gold and silver as well as food, forcing Boniface to retreat Clericis Laicos and allowing unpermitted taxation on the clergy. The two bitterly feuded into the fourteenth century where it would reach its climax. Philip the Fair assembled the Estates General for the first time in his reign, bringing together representatives of the clergy, the nobles, and everybody else in France to discuss the French relationship with the papacy. The Estates General sided with the king and Boniface responded with yet another papal bull. The Bull Unam Sanctam was Boniface’s assertion of his rights against Philip the Fair, declaring the church trumps any monarchial power in Europe. “The one and only Church is one body and one head, not two heads like a monster. Peter and the successors of Peter, since the Lord speaking to Peter Himself said ‘Feed my sheep’. Hence we must recognize the more clearly that spiritual power surpasses in dignity and in nobility any temporal power whatever, as spiritual things surpass the temporal.” Soon after Unam Sanctam Boniface tried to issue a bull that excommunicate Philip the Fair that was dated on September 8, 1303, but the day before the bull took effect Philip sent his chief minister to summon Boniface on a charge of heresy. On the 7 of September, 1303, Guillaume de Nogaret entered the town of Anagni, where the pope was spending time with his family, in force to tell Boniface that he must appear before a General Council. The pope was apprehended, imprisoned, insulted, and maybe even hit. This caused to Boniface go into shock and grew extremely ill throughout the month and on died on October 11, 1303, due a fever and exhaustion. Now that his stubborn adversary had past Philip the Fair struck at the opportunity to dominate the church and eventually get the papacy moved to France. It for these reasons that the Papacy settled at Avignon and it was because of the Avignon Papacy for the eventual split in the church.
During its’ time in Avignon, the papacy sided heavily with the France in conflicts due to the crown’s influence in the nomination and election of church officials. After Boniface’s death the College of Cardinals elected Pope Benedict XI who tried to follow his predecessor’s footsteps keeping the French crown at bay. Boniface VIII’s successor was a short lived one with Benedict XI who stubbornly resisted to the demands of Philip the Fair that he should lift the excommunication sentence on the French chancellor. A year later with the papal throne vacant the conclave elected the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Clement V in 1305. Clement could not match the determination as Boniface and was persuaded by Philip to stay in France and elect nine French cardinals to give them an overall majority in the Sacred College. Clement was crowned Pope Lyons which was suggested by the Philip himself. Without realizing he was doing so in the first few weeks being pope Clement determined the papacy’s stay in the Rhone Valley. He loved Gascony, where he was born and started his clerical career at Agen. He surrounded himself with Gascons and all of his French cardinals he elected to the college were Gascon. Clement stayed in the south of France from then on gathering more and more curia around him. Clement would eventually move his papal curia to Avignon, making it the papacy a permanent resident. This caused Italy to plunge into chaos and the whole country between Rome and Milan was convulsed, and the papal states were stirred up to even greater disorder. The papacy returning to central Italy was now completely out of the question.
Clement V died in 1314 but there would not be a new pope named until 1316 when John XXII was elected by a conclave in Lyon ordered by the Count of Poitiers, brother of the King of France Louis X. John had no intent to build the papacy at Avignon because he truly desired to return it to Rome and could have tried to go being heavily backed by the King of “Sicily” Robert of Anjou. But Avignon was pleasant to the pope were as Italy was disturbed and insecure; and powerful Robert might have been he still could not promise the pope peace and dignity on his arrival in Rome. John XXII died in 1334 and despite his energetic efforts to return the papacy to Rome, it stayed in Avignon the eighteen years he was pope where he conducted international diplomacy and worked to reorganize the church. The Pope found it exceptionally easy to govern Christendom from Avignon having no difficulty simultaneously negotiating with the kings of France and England.
Nine days after John XXII death, Pope Benedict XII was elected. The new pope was a cold, remote man who loved justice and despised inefficiency, and his first act as pope was to reform the administration of the church as well as abolishing all of predecessor’s Italy policies. Because of this the Italian people began to turn their backs to the papacy and Benedict started to receive criticism from Petrarch, an Italian scholar visiting Avignon. Petrarch found no sympathy in the coldness of Benedict, continually urging the pope, for his own sake, to return the curia to Rome. He ridiculed the “Frenchified” Avignon curia and caricatured its residence in France dubbing this period in papal history as “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church”. Petrarch would also write letters to friends about his stay in France and in one he expresses his anguish about the Avignon Papacy, “Now I am living in France, in the Babylon of the West. The sun in its travels sees nothing more hideous than this place on the shores of the wild Rhone. Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strongly forgotten their origin. I am astounded, as I recall their predecessors, to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations.” Despite Benedict’s organizational skills he could not reach a compromise with Anglo-French disputes over Aquitaine, and the succession of the French crown. He tried in vain but Benedicts constant efforts could not prevent the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337.
Both France and England sought to allay themselves and influence the papacy in either of their favor to gain an upper hand in the conflict. Now than ever before the clergy was heavily involved in more important governmental roles and had as much to do with the development and onslaught of the Hundred Years War as the combat. During the Hundred Years War members of the clergy played increasingly important roles in diplomacy, tax collection, military planning, local defense, and the distribution of information. Being most in contact with the peasantry, the kings used the clergy to spread propaganda or pray for victory, and in some cases local defense. The Hundred Years War, was one of the sole reason for the inevitable division of the papacy. The papacy moving to Avignon caused outrage in England, viewing the pope as a French pawn. The papacy at Avignon always seemed to favor the French crown more over the English, and early on in the war all the popes at Avignon were Frenchmen. Their nationality as well as where they resided certainly did influenced the way they adapted their traditional role to day-to-day events and the development of Western Europe. The church was thrusted firmly into the grubby orbit of Anglo-French politics and a consequence of this was the English church slowly became divided from the rest of the continent. The English clergy were being forced to decide where their priorities and loyalties lay- with the king or the pope. Both monarchs wanted to have complete authority of the church because of the enormous expenses, resources, properties, and lands; attempting many times make the church apart of the state machine to justify the Hundred Years War. The political division between France and England became mirrored in the division of the papacy.
Before returning the papacy to Rome in 1376 Pope Gregory XI tried to bring peace between the Anglos and the French but all negotiations failed to cease the hostilities. By returning to Rome Gregory XI was able to save the Papal States but paid a price through the Hundred Years War and the criticism by the English clergy of the church’s whole structure and administration. Gregory XI died in 1378 and whoever had to succeed him would have found himself in difficulties within a matter of weeks and required an impossible combination of qualities: firm conviction, a generous mind, an international outlook, a steady nerve, greatness of soul, saintliness, diplomacy, skill in war and love for peace. The conclave produced Pope Urban VI, a man despised by the very cardinals who elected him. Urban heavily reformed the College of Cardinals and right away proved problematic. These cardinals became more and more disgruntled by Urban VI and soon rebelled against him. They published a large manifesto where the thirteen angary cardinals came back to France to elect a new Avignon pope to rival Urban VI and they elected the French king’s cousin, Robert of Geneva who took the name Clement VII. The Great Schism brought the violence of the Hundred Years War to the doorstep of the church. The clergy began to be attacked by raiders and mercenaries as well as the destruction of churches its belongings. These marauding men hit the clergy of France the worst, forcing churchmen to leave their parishes. During this time it was like there was no church in France due the abandonment of the clergy and the congregation but also because the church’s revenues were depleted. The church was as much to blame for their near destruction as the monarchs and mercenaries because the advocated the support of the war for their sided nation. Trying to preserve their universal character, the clergy both promoted the war and prayed for peace. Because of the papacy moving to France and the conflict between England and France there was a schism in the church. The church had no choice to try and fix their problems, learning something from the French monarch.
After the schism the clergy brought all of the problematic questions they had and were able to compromise, reuniting the church in Europe. It was just when these questions seemed particularly pressing and acute that the schism broke. There is no doubt that the existence of a separate papal capital at Avignon both helped cause and prolong the schism. Both popes were now in real difficulty, for both had lost their home bases. In France, new laws closed all channels of income to Benedict XIII. Gregory XII was unable to return to Rome due Ladislas’s forces in the Papal State ready to take him prisoner. The cardinals of both parties found themselves, much to their respective masters’ dismay when they heard this news they began to agree that a General Council could save the church, and decided that both popes should be forced step down. They planned more and then announced to the world that on March 25, 1409, a council will be held in Pisa. Hundreds of delegates from both sides assembled at Pisa where they mostly bickered back and forth until the decided that the united cardinalates alone should elect a new pope. This decision proved to help widen the schism in the church when the conclave elected a short lived third pope, Alexander V who was then succeeded by John XXIII. In 1414 another council was announced to once and for all solve the schism along with John XXIII resignation. The Roman pope Gregory XI endorsed this decision and later resigned in 1415. The Council of Constance ended the schism with the election of Martin V as pope and declared that it derives its power directly from Christ. “This holy synod of Constance, forming a general council for the extirpation of the present schism and the union and reformation, in head and members, of the Church of God.” Finally after the thirty-nine year schism the church was reunited and determined to deeply reform the clergy. The general revolt against papal theory as well as papal administration and taxation at royal courts and in national assemblies during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a measure of the damage done to papal prestige by the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Schism. The schism marked the onset of Renaissance humanism in the church and nationalism throughout the world. After the schism the coming centuries saw a domination of absolute government, in the church and the state alike. Thanks to Avignon, papal French relations were peaceful, and it was even with the help and assistance of the French king that the church was transformed into a papal monarchy. Without the solid accomplishments of the Avignon popes made is possible for the popes of the fifteenth century to live the way they did. Future popes were able to reside in the Vatican in the manor their predecessors lived at Avignon. The way of life at Avignon spread throughout Rome and made up the life style and government of the popes of the Renaissance. The growing schism in the church as well as the conflicts among secular powers, the church realized they had to think for the better for themselves and with the confidence they had gained from the French the church was able to pull together.
The Medieval Era was a race for gaining of power especially in Western Europe among the French Monarchy and the Catholic Church. Popes like Boniface VIII tried to resist the influences of the king, attempting to put the monarchy beneath the church, excommunicating Philip the Fair. It was Philip’s influence that had the papacy in Avignon, which was the sole reason for the inevitable schism in the church. Political events like the Hundred Years War between France and England also fueled the flames of the heresy. The church eventually made amends with each other and gained the coveted power over Europe.

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(Connecticut: Archon Books, 1970), 133.
[ 2 ]. Pope Boniface VIII. “Medieval Sourcebook: Boniface VIII, Clericis Laicos, 1296”. Fordham University. (January 1996).
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[ 19 ]. Green, The Hundred Years War: A People’s History, 66-7.
[ 20 ]. Renouard The Avignon Papacy, 134.
[ 21 ]. Smith, The Great Schism, 1378, 170.
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[ 25 ]. Renouard The Avignon Papacy, 133-4.