Church history · Late Medieval
Avignon Papacy and the Western Schism
AD 1309-1417
French political pressure moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon for nearly seventy years, and its return to Rome triggered the Western Schism, a decades-long crisis in which rival claimants to the papacy divided Western Christendom until the Council of Constance restored a single, unified papacy.
The event
In 1309, under heavy pressure from the French crown, the French-born Pope Clement V relocated the papal court from Rome to Avignon, in southern France, where it remained for nearly seventy years under a succession of French popes widely (if not entirely fairly) perceived across Europe as excessively subject to French royal influence — a period the Italian poet Petrarch memorably, if polemically, dubbed the "Babylonian Captivity" of the papacy.
Pope Gregory XI finally returned the papacy to Rome in 1377, but his death the following year triggered a far more serious crisis: the College of Cardinals, under pressure from a Roman crowd demanding an Italian pope, elected Urban VI, whose harsh and erratic behavior quickly alienated many of the same cardinals, who then declared his election invalid and elected a rival pope, Clement VII, who established a competing papal court back in Avignon.
The resulting Western Schism (1378-1417) saw the church divided under two, and eventually briefly three, simultaneous claimants to the papacy, each excommunicating the others and commanding the allegiance of different European kingdoms along largely political lines — a scandal that badly damaged the prestige and perceived spiritual authority of the papal office across Western Christendom and fueled calls for institutional reform, including the emergence of "conciliarist" theories arguing that a general council of the church held authority superior to any single pope.
The schism was finally resolved at the Council of Constance (1414-1418), which deposed or accepted the resignation of the rival claimants and elected a single new pope, Martin V, restoring institutional unity, though the underlying tensions over reform, papal authority, and conciliar power that the schism exposed continued to shape church politics for the following century, contributing to the broader climate of institutional crisis and calls for reform that preceded the Protestant Reformation.
Other witnesses
- Acts of the Council of Constance (1414-1418)
Further reading
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