The Avignon Papacy (1309-1376) was the period during which seven successive popes resided at Avignon, in modern-day southern France, rather than at Rome. It followed a bitter conflict between the papacy and King Philip IV of France, and the death of Pope Boniface VIII in 1303 marked a decisive shift in the balance of power within the Church. Talia Bega explains — and looks at where it was over for France following a series of problems.
You can read part 1 on the Church in the 13th century here, part 2 on the Rise of Philip IV and financial problems here, and part 3 on the start of the Papacy here.
A fresco of Pope Clément VI in the Chapelle Saint-Martial of the Palais des Papes by Matteo Giovanetti . Source: Public domain, Palais des Papes, available here.
The issues of France
After the death of Philip IV, France slid deeper into difficulty, weakened by a crisis of succession as his sons died one after another without surviving male heirs. In 1328 the crown passed from the House of Capet to the House of Valois under a new king, Philip VI - a shift that concentrated authority ever more firmly in French hands. As the earlier articles described, the first Avignon popes were largely creatures of these powerful French kings. Clement V, for instance, had bowed to Philip IV over the Knights Templar, whom the king had arrested in 1307 and whose order Clement went on to abolish in 1312.
Under John XXII, the papacy struggled to master the turbulent Italian states and to fend off the powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Louis IV. These popes issued a stream of decrees that kept the papacy anchored in France, at a safe remove from the conflicts that had engulfed the Church at the start of the fourteenth century. John's successor, Benedict XII, was a very different figure: an austere Cistercian and reformer who set about curbing the luxury and abuses of the papal court rather than indulging in them. His pontificate coincided with a gathering storm, as Edward III of England pressed his claim to the French throne and launched a series of campaigns to make it good.
To meet this threat, Philip VI leaned on the Church to help defend his throne against English conquest. In 1337 there began the long struggle that would reshape both kingdoms - the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), a contest for the very survival of the French crown. Benedict XII (Jacques Fournier), who had succeeded John XXII in 1334, was French-born and had risen through a long ecclesiastical career, serving as bishop of Pamiers from 1317 and being made a cardinal in 1327. A committed reformer, he tightened discipline in the religious orders, began building the Palais des Papes, and settled a lingering theological dispute with his bull on the beatific vision (1336); he also kept up the running conflict with Louis IV, which both sides were by now anxious to resolve.
The English Issue
Clement VI (Pierre Roger) was the fourth Avignon pope in unbroken French succession, and he came to the office after a long career in the Church. A gifted scholar, he had studied and taught at Paris and held a series of ecclesiastical posts. In 1326 he became abbot of Fécamp, one of the great royal abbeys of France, a position that placed him close to the crown. He was also entrusted with important diplomatic missions, including matters touching the Duchy of Aquitaine and relations with England.
He served as a royal counsellor, becoming bishop of Arras in 1328 and then, after a spell as archbishop of Sens, archbishop of Rouen in 1330 - demanding roles in which he worked to keep the peace between the French and English crowns. He also entered the great theological debate of the day: in 1333 he defended the orthodox view of the beatific vision, that the souls of the blessed behold God immediately after death. When he was elected pope in 1342, he enjoyed strong backing from the French court - including the king's son John, the future John II - and from a conclave dominated by French cardinals, which settled on him within two days.
Crowned at Pentecost amid a throng of French supporters, Clement owed much of his standing to the French crown and to the connections he had built over the years - an alignment that would later complicate his efforts at peacemaking, even as Edward III's victories mounted in the Hundred Years' War (Gruber, 1933, 193). Among the marks of his reign was the creation of a host of new cardinals, overwhelmingly French, which bound the College still more tightly to French interests. The Black Death, which swept away perhaps a third of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351, posed a graver challenge still: Clement granted remission of sins to those who died of the plague and, when Jews were scapegoated for it, issued bulls forbidding their persecution.
Like most popes, Clement was drawn into the quarrels of princes. He backed Charles IV of Luxembourg against Louis IV in the contest for the Empire, and after Louis's death in 1347 the imperial succession remained disputed. He also cast himself as a mediator between France and England, working to shore up the French throne and to keep the peace whenever the monarchs seemed bent on renewed conflict. Clement died in 1352, leaving the Church to face deepening troubles. His reign had been a boon to France - built on the authority he had won under earlier French kings - but that advantage would not long outlast him.
So what?
For the English, it often seemed that the Church was not on their side (Gruber, 1933, 194). A succession of truces - Malestroit in 1343, Calais in 1347 - punctuated the fighting, and although the English held the military advantage in these early years, they increasingly regarded the Avignon Papacy as an instrument of the French crown (Menache, 1986, 427). They came to see it as a threat, and under Clement VI that suspicion only deepened. These first four Avignon popes are worth dwelling on before we reach 1370, for they set the stage for the upheavals that would soon convulse Europe.
France, too, was troubled in these years, wracked by internal strife and the loss of territory to England. The situation nonetheless allowed the papacy to support France quietly, without provoking the English crown by open favoritism. The real question is how France would emerge from it all: its kings often looked weak, and it remained to be seen whether the Church could survive alongside them.
Now read about the War of the Breton Succession here.
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References
Gruber, John. “The Peace Negotiations of the Avignon Popes.” The Catholic Historical Review 19, no. 2 (1933): 190–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25013157.
Menache, Sophia. “The Failure of John XXII’s Policy toward France and England: Reasons and Outcomes, 1316-1334.” Church History, vol. 55, no. 4, 1986, pp. 423–37. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3166366. Accessed 5 Aug. 2026.
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