The Avignon Papacy and the Western Schism

For nearly seventy years, the bishops of Rome did not live in Rome. From 1309 to 1377 the papal court resided mainly at Avignon, a city on the Rhône under heavy French influence. Critics called it a Babylonian Captivity. Then, after Gregory XI returned to Rome and died, Latin Christendom split in the Western Schism (1378–1417): two, and later three, rival claimants to the papacy, each with cardinals, taxes, and saints’ calendars of obedience. This article explains how the Avignon period began, what it changed in church government, why the schism erupted, and how the Council of Constance restored a single pope while raising lasting questions about councils and reform.

The story sits between high-medieval papal monarchy and the reformations of the sixteenth century. Prestige drained; fiscal machinery grew; nations chose popes like allies; conciliar theorists argued that a general council could judge a pope. Britannica’s entries on the Avignon papacy, the Western Schism, and Constance provide the backbone. The task here is to keep French politics, Italian chaos, and sincere reform hopes in one frame—because contemporaries lived them together.

The Short Answer

The Avignon papacy began when Clement V, a Frenchman elected after the violent clash between Boniface VIII and King Philip IV of France, settled the curia at Avignon (from 1309). Seven French popes followed until Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377. The Avignon court centralized administration and finance, lived under a reputation of French captivity (partly exaggerated, partly earned), and damaged Roman prestige. After Gregory’s death, the disputed election of Urban VI (Rome) and the rival election of Clement VII (Avignon line) opened the Western Schism. Obediences divided Europe. The Council of Pisa (1409) tried to depose both and created a third line. The Council of Constance (1414–1418) secured resignations/depositions and elected Martin V in 1417, ending the schism’s main phase. Outcomes included restored papal unity, strengthened conciliar theory (later contested), the burning of Jan Hus, and a louder European demand for reform that the fifteenth century did not fully satisfy.

Road to Avignon: Boniface VIII and Philip IV

The later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries strained papal monarchy. Boniface VIII (1294–1303) asserted sweeping claims—most famously in Unam Sanctam (1302)—about papal supremacy. Philip IV of France needed clerical taxes and refused to treat the pope as master of French public finance. Conflict escalated into the outrage at Anagni (1303), where Boniface was seized by enemies aligned with French interests and died soon after. The next papal elections produced Clement V (1305–1314), a Frenchman who never securely reestablished residence in Rome and from 1309 made Avignon the practical capital of the papal court.

Clement’s pontificate included the suppression of the Knights Templar under heavy French pressure—a moral and political wound that stained Avignon’s beginnings. Whether Clement was simply Philip’s tool is disputed; Britannica notes French pressure as decisive in much of his decision-making. What is attested is the pattern: a papacy geographically and culturally drawn into the French orbit after a bruising defeat.

What the Avignon Papacy Built

Avignon was not only a scandal in opponents’ pamphlets. It was a functioning capital. The papal bureaucracy expanded: provisions to benefices, taxation systems, judicial offices, and diplomatic networks. Missionary horizons still reached far; university patronage continued; popes attempted to mediate wars. Britannica emphasizes administrative reorganization, reform measures for clergy, and missionary stimulus alongside the damage to prestige. A fair account holds both: competence and captivity reputation.

The Sacred College of Cardinals grew in governmental weight. French majorities made future elections predictable—and made Italians furious. Rome’s economy and communal politics suffered from the court’s absence; the city’s factions made return dangerous. Urban V and others attempted returns; Gregory XI finally reentered Rome in January 1377, partly to secure papal territories in Italy. He died in 1378. The geographic problem was solved just in time for the electoral problem to explode.

Voices of Protest: Saints, Poets, and Reformers

Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden urged the pope’s return to Rome in prophetic and pastoral tones. Petrarch’s letters mocked Avignon as Babylon. Political enemies in Italy had worldly reasons to want the curia back; holy women gave the demand a spiritual script. The mix matters. “Return to Rome” was piety, property, and propaganda at once.

Complaints about luxury, simony, and absentee pastors were not invented by Protestants two centuries later. They were late medieval Catholic complaints. Avignon became a symbol onto which many reform hopes and hatreds could be projected—sometimes fairly, sometimes as scapegoat for wider clerical failures.

1378: Two Elections, Two Obediences

After Gregory XI’s death in Rome, the cardinals elected Bartolomeo Prignano as Urban VI under intense Roman pressure for a Roman or at least Italian pope. Urban quickly alienated the cardinals with harsh reformist temper and hostility to their privileges. A group of cardinals withdrew, declared Urban’s election invalid because made under fear, and elected Robert of Geneva as Clement VII, who returned the rival court to Avignon. Europe divided. France and its allies generally backed Avignon; England and others backed Rome; the map shifted with alliances in the Hundred Years’ War era. Saints appeared on both sides. Ordinary dioceses faced a nightmare: which pope’s provisions filled the vacant benefice? Which excommunication counted?

Catholic historians generally treat the Roman line (Urban VI and successors) as the legitimate popes, Britannica notes, though without an official pronouncement that settles every canonical puzzle for all time in popular imagination. For historical description, what matters is that sincere Christians disagreed, and institutions doubled.

Pisa Makes Three; Constance Makes One

Frustration produced the Council of Pisa (1409), which attempted to end the schism by deposing both existing claimants and electing Alexander V (followed by John XXIII in the Pisan line). Neither Rome nor Avignon fully submitted. Christendom now had three obediences. The medicine worsened the disease—an attested lesson in reform history.

The Council of Constance (1414–1418), backed by Emperor Sigismund and broad European participation, finally broke the deadlock. John XXIII was deposed; Gregory XII (Roman line) resigned; the Avignon claimant Benedict XIII was abandoned by most supporters and opposed. In 1417 the conclave elected Martin V, restoring a widely recognized single papacy. Constance also condemned and executed Jan Hus (1415), tying the reunification council to Bohemian religious revolt’s next chapter. The council issued Haec sancta and reform decrees that asserted conciliar authority—texts later contested in Catholic interpretation. Unity of the papal office returned; consensus on how to reform the church did not.

Conciliarism and the Question of Ultimate Authority

If a council can depose popes to save the church, does the council outrank the pope? Conciliarists said necessity had shown as much. Popes after Martin V worked to restore papal monarchy and to contain conciliar theory—especially after Basel’s later conflicts. The Western Schism thus left a constitutional aftertaste. Even where later Catholicism reaffirmed papal primacy, the memory remained: the church had appealed beyond a disputed pope to a council.

That memory mattered in the sixteenth century. Reformers and Catholic monarchs alike knew that Latin Christianity had already survived a season of multiple papal claimants. Prestige once broken does not fully reset. Avignon and the schism are therefore not only late medieval episodes; they are prologue to Reformation-era credibility crises.

National Churches in Practice

During the schism, kings influenced which obedience their realms followed. The church’s transnational claim met the rising fact of national blocs. French clergy had pragmatic reasons to prefer Avignon; English policy often preferred Rome as part of wider conflict with France. The papacy looked less like an impartial father and more like a diplomatic chip. When Martin V restored unity, he inherited a Europe practiced at managing the church through royal concordats and national pressure—the fifteenth-century pattern of limited papal freedom.

Fiscal grievances also nationalized. Two (or three) curias meant multiplied fees. Anti-curial feeling in Germany, England, and elsewhere drew on real payment streams. “Reform in head and members” became a slogan at Constance because the head had been plural and the members exhausted.

What Ordinary Christians Experienced

Most believers did not follow canonical tracts. They experienced uncertainty about the true pope as uncertainty about which bishop was validly appointed, whether their confessor’s faculties were recognized, and whether crusading or indulgence campaigns from one obedience were holy or fraudulent. Mystics and prophets claimed revelations on rival sides, deepening confusion. The schism was thus a pastoral trauma inside a shared Latin rite.

Religious orders split by obedience or navigated carefully. Universities issued rival statements. Saints’ cults became geopolitical. When unity returned, relief mixed with cynicism: if the church could err so loudly about its own head, what else might need reform?

The Avignon Line of Popes and the Italian Vacuum

The seven Avignon popes—from Clement V through Gregory XI—were all French. Their court built the Palais des Papes into a fortress-residence whose architecture still advertises power. Meanwhile the Papal States in Italy slipped toward local tyrannies, condottieri, and communal revolt. Absence had a territorial price. Returning the pope was also a strategy to recover land, not only a spiritual homecoming. Gregory XI’s 1377 return fits that double logic. Historians who treat Avignon as only a French vacation miss the Italian military file.

John XXII, Benedict XII, Clement VI, Innocent VI, Urban V, and their colleagues differed in severity and reform energy. Some issued disciplinary constitutions; some were patrons of arts and universities; some fought heresy and the Franciscan Spirituals with legal force. Lumping them as identical “Babylon” figures is polemic. The captivity charge still stuck because the college looked French and the bishop of Rome was not in Rome. Perception is a historical force. Petrarch did not need to be statistically fair to be politically effective.

Obediences as a map of Europe

During the schism, “obedience” meant a network: which cardinals, which universities, which royal chanceries recognized which pope. Scotland, Castile, and Aragon made their own calculations; the Empire’s princes split; Naples and other Italian powers flipped with wars. The church’s unity had always been compatible with local custom; now it was incompatible with a single named pontiff. Priests ordained under one obedience might be declared irregular under the other. Marriage cases could receive opposite rulings. The crisis was canonical fog in daily life.

Constance’s decree Frequens called for regularly scheduled councils as a reform mechanism. Later popes did not make that rhythm stick. Haec sancta (1415) asserted conciliar superiority in certain terms that remain among the most disputed documents in Catholic constitutional history. This article need not settle the canonical status for modern church lawyers. It must report that Constance acted as if a council could save the church from popes—and that later papal restoration treated that “as if” as dangerous memory.

Jan Hus at Constance shows the council’s other face. Unity against rival popes did not mean leniency toward Bohemian reform preaching. Hus’s execution, after a safe-conduct controversy that stained Sigismund’s honor in Czech memory, helped turn a theological dispute into national resistance. The same assembly that ended the papal schism fed another schism of a different kind. Church history should not celebrate 1417 as a clean triumph without that cost.

Martin V returned a single curia to Rome’s orbit and began rebuilding papal government in Italy. The Renaissance papacy’s later splendors and scandals grow from this restored, still-defensive monarchy. Avignon’s clerks and Constance’s trauma both inhabit that restoration. To jump from Innocent III’s peak to Luther without this valley is to misunderstand why sixteenth-century Europeans could imagine that the papacy might be wrong in public and still need drastic medicine.

What This Article Does Not Claim

This article does not claim that Avignon popes accomplished nothing good, or that Urban VI’s personality alone caused the schism, or that Constance solved reform. It does not conflate the Western Schism with 1054. It claims a tighter thesis: residence at Avignon centralized the church while wounding its Roman sacrality, and the schism that followed forced Latin Christianity to reunite the papacy by conciliar emergency measures that left authority questions smoldering.

Fiscal machinery deserves one more plain sentence. Annates, provisions, and expectative grants made the curia look like a market in offices whether at Avignon or in schism. Even popes who used the money for diplomacy and charity inherited the smell of sale. Reformers who later attacked indulgences were walking into a field already plowed by late medieval anger at paid spiritual government. Avignon did not invent church taxes; it made them look foreign and French to much of Europe, which was enough to poison the brand.

Teaching the Dual Crisis

Teach Avignon and the Western Schism as one arc, not two trivia facts. First, show Anagni and Clement V. Second, show what Avignon administered well and what it symbolized badly. Third, show 1378 as an election crisis under pressure. Fourth, show Pisa’s failure and Constance’s success. Fifth, refuse to stop at 1417 without naming Hus and unfinished reform. Students then see why fifteenth-century Europe kept calling councils and why sixteenth-century Europe exploded when reform of the head still seemed blocked.

Comparative note: Eastern Orthodoxy watched Latin chaos with a mix of concern and confirmation bias. Reunion negotiations in the Florence era occurred in a world that remembered Latin disunity as well as Latin power. Church history is always overheard by rivals.

Conclusion

The Avignon papacy relocated the head of Latin Christendom into a French-dominated court, advancing bureaucracy while eroding the mystique of Rome. Gregory XI’s return did not erase the damage. The Western Schism multiplied papal claimants until Constance rebuilt unity in the person of Martin V. Between 1309 and 1417, Europeans learned that the papacy could wander, split, and be repaired by a council—lessons that empowered reformers and haunted popes.

The outcome was a single pope again, and a church still crying for reform in head and members. That unfinished cry is the hinge on which later Catholic and Protestant stories turn. Avignon and the schism are therefore not side paths. They are the late medieval papacy’s proving ground—and, for many contemporaries, its near shipwreck.