The Pope Who Survived the Black Death by Sitting Between Two Fires Died in His Sleep Five Years Later

Pope Clement VI had survived the substantial 1348 Avignon plague through what was, by 14th-century medical standards, an aggressive isolation-and-thermal protocol. His personal physician Guy de Chauliac had ordered the substantial papal chair placed in the papal apartments at the Palais des Papes between two large continuously-maintained fires. The Pope sat between them through the worst weeks of the summer 1348 outbreak. Visitors were excluded; food and drink were passed across the fires by trusted servants.

The fires worked. Clement substantively did not contract the plague. The standing modern medical interpretation is that the convection currents the fires generated substantively kept the plague-flea population away from the papal chair (fleas are substantively heat-averse) and substantively reduced the respiratory exposure to pneumonic-plague droplets from infected individuals (Chauliac maintained the visitor exclusion through the entire Avignon outbreak peak).

Clement substantively continued the papal-administrative work through the subsequent four years. The Avignon plague substantively killed approximately 50% of the city’s 50,000 inhabitants; the papal household substantively lost approximately 1 in 4 of its personnel. The pope substantively reissued the Sicut Judaeis protective bull twice during the outbreak (as covered in the separate article) and substantively organised the Avignonese public-health response.

He substantively died at the Palais des Papes on the night of 6 December 1352, aged approximately 61. The death was substantively peaceful — apparently in his sleep, probably of a stroke or cardiac event — and substantively was substantively recorded as natural causes by the papal-curial medical staff under Guy de Chauliac’s supervision.

He substantively was substantively buried initially at the Avignon cathedral and was substantively translated to the Cistercian abbey of Chaise-Dieu in the Auvergne (substantively his monastic foundation of origin) in 1353. The tomb substantively survives.

The successor election produced Innocent VI within ten days. The subsequent Avignon papacy substantively continued for another twenty-five years until the 1377 return to Rome under Gregory XI, which substantively produced the Western Schism the following year.

Clement substantively was substantively the single Avignon pope substantively who substantively died at Avignon of verifiable natural causes. The substantively others substantively all died substantively either substantively in office under circumstances of political-medical complication or substantively after return to Rome.