Why Avignon
The move began with a corpse trial’s worth of Franco-papal warfare: Boniface VIII’s collision with France’s Philip IV ended with the pope manhandled by French agents at Anagni (1303) and dead weeks later. The Gascon elected as Clement V in 1305 never reached Rome — anarchy in the papal states, pressure from Philip (whose destruction of the Templars Clement duly rubber-stamped) — and in 1309 settled at Avignon on the Rhône: technically not French soil, effectively within the French king’s reach. What looked temporary lasted 68 years and seven popes, every one of them French, as was the swelling majority of their cardinals.
Babylon on the Rhône
Avignon’s papacy was a paradox: administratively brilliant, spiritually discredited. It perfected the machinery of the medieval Church — centralised appointments, taxation, and courts that made it Europe’s most sophisticated government — and built the fortress-palace to house it: the Palais des Papes, the largest palace in medieval Europe, frescoed by Italian masters. The same machinery, running visibly on money, fed the era’s anticlericalism; Petrarch, who knew the town well, fixed the label — a sink of vice, the “Babylon of the West”, its papal residence a Babylonian Captivity to match Israel’s.
The verdict was never quite fair. Clement VI (r. 1342-52), most princely of the line, met the Black Death with better instincts than most contemporary rulers — buying the whole city of Avignon along the way, and issuing bulls that condemned the plague pogroms and sheltered Jews when much of Europe was burning them. But independence was the test, and with the papacy’s prestige mortgaged to France — conspicuously during the Hundred Years War — Christendom increasingly agreed with the poets.
Return, and worse
Saints applied the final pressure: Bridget of Sweden, then the ferocious young Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena, who travelled to Avignon in 1376 to tell Gregory XI to his face to go home. Gregory re-entered Rome in 1377 — and died within the year. The Roman mob demanded an Italian pope; the cardinals elected one, repented under pressure, and elected a Frenchman too: the Western Schism (1378-1417), Latin Christendom split between rival popes at Rome and Avignon — briefly three, after the Council of Pisa’s fix added a third — each excommunicating the others’ obediences entire. The Council of Constance finally cleared the board in 1417. The institution survived; the exile-and-schism century had taught Europe’s rulers and reformers alike that the papacy could be pressured, split, and judged — tuition later collected, with interest, at Wittenberg.