The Avignon Papacy: When the Popes Left Rome

From 1309 to 1377, the popes of the Catholic Church did not reside in Rome. Instead, they lived in Avignon, a city in what is now southern France, under the shadow — and often the influence — of the French crown. This period, sometimes called the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy in reference to the Israelites’ exile in the Old Testament, remains one of the strangest chapters in the history of the church.

Why the Popes Left Rome

Rome in the early fourteenth century was a dangerous and unstable place, plagued by violent feuding among aristocratic families and lacking the infrastructure to reliably support a papal court. When the French archbishop Bertrand de Got was elected Pope Clement V in 1305, he chose not to travel to Rome at all, and in 1309 he settled the papal court in Avignon, a city that, while not technically part of France, sat well within its political orbit.

A Golden Cage

Clement’s successors continued the arrangement, and Pope Benedict XII began construction of the massive Palais des Papes, a fortress-like palace that still dominates Avignon’s skyline today. The Avignon papacy was, in many ways, an efficient and well-administered period for the church bureaucracy; the papal court developed sophisticated systems of finance and record-keeping. But it came at a steep cost to the papacy’s independence and reputation, as critics throughout Europe — including the poet Petrarch, who compared Avignon to a den of corruption — increasingly viewed the popes as puppets of the French monarchy.

The Return to Rome

Pressure to return to Rome grew steadily, driven in part by figures like St. Catherine of Siena, who wrote urgently to Pope Gregory XI urging him to bring the papacy home. Gregory finally did so in 1377, ending the Avignon period. But his death the following year triggered an even greater crisis.

The Western Schism

In 1378, a disputed papal election produced two rival claimants to the papal throne — one in Rome and one back in Avignon — each with their own supporters among the crowned heads of Europe. This event, known as the Western Schism, would eventually produce a third rival claimant and would not be fully resolved until the Council of Constance in 1417. The Avignon papacy and the schism that followed badly damaged the prestige of the papal office and fed a growing appetite for church reform that would eventually erupt, a century later, in the Protestant Reformation.