The Outrage of Anagni and the Theft of the Papacy
On September 7, 1303, a column of armed men rode into the hilltop town of Anagni, sixty kilometers southeast of Rome. They were led by Sciarra Colonna, a Roman nobleman with a vendetta, and Guillaume de Nogaret, a lawyer in the service of King Philip IV of France. Their target was Pope Boniface VIII, who had retreated to his family’s palace in Anagni for the summer — and who had, in the preceding months, issued a papal bull declaring the authority of the pope supreme over every king, prince, and temporal ruler on Earth.
Philip had responded by convening a council that accused Boniface of heresy, sodomy, and the murder of his predecessor. Nogaret’s orders were to arrest the pope and deliver him to France for trial.
The accounts of what happened inside the palace diverge along national lines. The Italian version has Colonna striking the seventy-year-old pope across the face with a mailed gauntlet — the schiaffo di Anagni, the slap that echoed across centuries of Church history. The French version describes a three-day imprisonment during which Boniface was denied food and water. Both versions agree on the ending: the townspeople of Anagni, appalled at the treatment of the pope regardless of their feelings about his politics, rose against the French soldiers and freed Boniface. He returned to Rome. Within five weeks, he was dead — of kidney stones, of shock, of the specific humiliation of being the first pope in history physically assaulted by a secular power’s agents in his own residence.
The conclave that followed was deadlocked for eleven months. Philip applied pressure. The cardinals elected Bertrand de Got, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name Clement V. He was crowned in Lyon, in Philip’s presence, and never traveled to Rome. In 1309, he moved the entire papal court — its cardinals, its bureaucracy, its treasury, its judicial apparatus — to Avignon, a city on the Rhône that technically belonged not to France but to the papal vassal state of the Angevin counts of Provence. The distinction was a legal fiction. The pope was now living under French protection, in a French-speaking city, surrounded by French cardinals, and making decisions that consistently aligned with French interests.
The Italians called it the cattività avignonese — the Avignon captivity. Petrarch, who grew up in Avignon and despised every stone of it, reached further back for his analogy: the Babylonian Captivity, a reference to the seventy years the Israelites spent in exile after the destruction of Jerusalem. The comparison was rhetorically potent and chronologically convenient — the popes would remain in Avignon for almost exactly the same duration. The institution that departed Rome as the supreme spiritual authority of Western civilization would return sixty-seven years later as a weakened, contested, and morally compromised brand. The fortress it built on the rock above the Rhône — the largest Gothic palace in Europe — would stand as the physical evidence of what happens when an institution dedicated to humility decides it needs fifteen thousand square meters of fortified floor space to do its job.
The Babylonian Captivity: How Avignon Became the Capital of Christendom
Clement V, Philip IV, and the Destruction of the Knights Templar
Clement V’s pontificate established the template that would define the Avignon papacy: a pope who owed his throne to a king and spent his reign repaying the debt. The most spectacular payment was the destruction of the Knights Templar.
On Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip IV ordered the simultaneous arrest of every Templar in France — more than 600 men seized in a single dawn raid. The charges were heresy, blasphemy, sodomy, and spitting on the cross during initiation ceremonies. The confessions were extracted under torture: joints dislocated on the rack, feet roasted over coals, bones broken with hammers. The Templars were the wealthiest military order in Christendom, bankers to half the crowned heads of Europe, and Philip owed them an enormous sum he had no intention of repaying.
Clement vacillated. He issued a papal bull ordering all Christian monarchs to arrest Templars in their territories, then attempted to take control of the proceedings from Philip, then retreated under pressure. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he dissolved the order — not by condemning it, which would have required a formal trial, but by suppressing it through papal decree, a legal maneuver that avoided the question of guilt entirely. On March 18, 1314, the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned alive on a small island in the Seine within sight of Notre-Dame. According to a tradition that has proved durable if unverifiable, de Molay cursed both Clement and Philip from the flames, summoning them to meet him before God within the year. Clement died on April 20, 1314. Philip died on November 29, 1314. The coincidence was too perfect for medieval chroniclers to resist.
Clement never built a permanent palace in Avignon. He lived in Dominican priories and borrowed castles, governing the Church from temporary quarters as though the arrangement might still be reversed. It fell to his successors to make the exile permanent — and to build the architecture that would house it.
The Palais des Papes — The Largest Gothic Palace in Europe
The Palais des Papes rose in two phases, under two popes with radically different temperaments, and the building reflects both.
Benedict XII — austere, reform-minded, a former Cistercian monk — began the Old Palace around 1335. His architect, Pierre Poisson of Mirepoix, designed a structure that resembled a monastery crossed with a military installation: massive towers, thick walls, narrow windows, a cloister at the center. Benedict had intended to return the papacy to Rome but found the political conditions impossible. If the pope was going to stay in Avignon, Benedict reasoned, the building should reflect the sobriety of his office rather than the opulence of his predecessors. The result was a fortress. The Tower of Trouillas served as both a keep and a prison. The walls were built to withstand a siege. The aesthetic was one of deliberate austerity — a pope’s residence that looked like a place where a man might actually pray.
Clement VI had no such inhibitions. A Benedictine who reportedly said “my predecessors did not know how to be popes,” Clement commissioned the New Palace beginning in 1342. His architect, Jean de Louvres, expanded the complex southward and westward, adding the Grand Chapel, the Great Audience Hall, and a series of private apartments decorated with frescoes by the Italian painter Matteo Giovanetti. Giovanetti’s work in the Chapel of St. Martial and the Chapel of Sts. John — completed in 1348, the year the Black Death arrived — survives as some of the finest Gothic painting in Europe: saints and prophets rendered in deep blues and warm golds against backgrounds of architectural fantasy, the visual vocabulary of a papacy that had decided it was staying.
The completed palace covered 15,000 square meters — the largest Gothic palace ever built. The Grand Tinel, the vast banqueting hall on the upper floor, hosted six papal conclaves. The kitchens were built into an octagonal tower whose chimney — a pyramidal stone funnel rising through the center of the room — could roast an entire ox. The wine cellars held barrels from the papal vineyards at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, fourteen kilometers to the north, where Clement VI’s predecessors had established what remains one of France’s most celebrated wine appellations.
The building was a contradiction made physical: a fortress for an institution that preached peace, a palace for an institution that preached poverty, and a monument to permanence built by men who insisted their exile was temporary. The popes of Avignon spent sixty-seven years saying they were going back to Rome. They spent twenty of those years building a palace that said otherwise.
Petrarch, the Black Death, and the Stench of the Babylon of the West
Petrarch’s Avignon — “The Sewer of the Earth”
Francesco Petrarca — the poet who would later be credited with inventing the Renaissance — grew up in Avignon. His father, a Florentine notary, had followed the papal court to Provence after being exiled from Florence in the same political purge that expelled Dante. The young Petrarch studied at Montpellier and Avignon, moved through the circles of the papal curia, and spent decades in and around a city he came to loathe with a precision that only intimacy produces.
His denunciations are the most quoted descriptions of the Avignon papacy in existence. In a series of letters and sonnets written between 1340 and 1353, Petrarch compared Avignon to Babylon — the biblical city of corruption and exile — with a specificity that went beyond metaphor. He called it “the impious Babylon, the hell on earth, the sink of vice, the sewer of the earth.” He described a court consumed by simony, gluttony, and sexual predation. He accused the cardinals of living like princes while the faithful starved. He described the Rhône itself as polluted by the moral filth of the papal administration.
The woman Petrarch immortalized in his poetry — Laura, believed by many scholars to be Laura de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade and an ancestor of the Marquis — lived in Avignon. She died there on April 6, 1348, of the plague. Petrarch recorded her death in the margins of his copy of Virgil — a private notation that has survived for nearly seven centuries, the most famous marginalia in literary history.
The Black Death in the Papal City — 1348
The plague arrived in Avignon in January 1348, carried along the trade routes from Marseille. The city was uniquely vulnerable: a major center of commerce and pilgrimage, densely populated, its streets narrow and its sanitation medieval. The papal court had attracted thousands of clerics, petitioners, diplomats, merchants, and servants, creating a population density that the city’s infrastructure could not support even in healthy times.
Clement VI responded with a mixture of medieval theology and surprising pragmatism. His personal physician, Guy de Chauliac — one of the most important surgeons of the Middle Ages — advised him that the plague was spread through corrupted air and that surrounding himself with bonfires would purify the atmosphere. Clement sat between two enormous fires in his private chambers, receiving no visitors, while the city died around him. De Chauliac himself contracted the plague, survived it, and documented both forms — the pneumonic variety that killed within days and the bubonic form that offered a slim chance of recovery — in his masterwork Chirurgia Magna.
The death toll in Avignon was catastrophic. Estimates range from one-third to one-half of the city’s population. The cemeteries filled. The churchyards overflowed. Clement consecrated the entire Rhône River so that bodies could be thrown into it with ecclesiastical approval — a solution that was theologically creative and epidemiologically disastrous. Six cardinals died in 1348 alone. The papal bureaucracy, the most sophisticated administrative apparatus in Europe, was gutted.
Across Europe, the panic found its scapegoats. Rumors spread that Jews had poisoned the wells. Pogroms erupted in Germany, Switzerland, and the Rhineland — thousands murdered in Strasbourg, Mainz, Cologne. Clement issued two papal bulls in 1348 condemning the violence, declaring that those who blamed the Jews for the plague had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil,” and pointing out that Jews were dying of the disease at the same rate as Christians. He opened Avignon as a refuge for persecuted Jewish communities. The gesture was genuine, morally significant, and largely ignored by the mobs.
In the same year — 1348, with the plague still raging and the cemeteries still full — Clement purchased the city of Avignon outright from Queen Joanna I of Naples for 80,000 florins. The transaction formalized what had been true for decades: the papacy was not a guest in Avignon. It was the landlord.
The Western Schism — When Christendom Had Three Popes at Once
Gregory XI Returns to Rome and Dies — The Election That Split the Church
The campaign to bring the papacy home was sustained across decades by reformers, mystics, and Italian patriots who viewed the Avignon residence as a stain on the Church’s legitimacy. The most famous voice was Catherine of Siena, a Dominican tertiary whose letters to Pope Gregory XI combined mystical devotion with blunt political pressure. She called the papal court a place of “stench and misery” and urged Gregory, in language that was simultaneously reverent and commanding, to return to Rome and fulfill his duty as the successor of Saint Peter.
Gregory listened. In January 1377, against the wishes of the French king, his own cardinals, and the entire administrative infrastructure that had been built around the Avignon court over seven decades, he moved the papacy back to Rome. The Eternal City he found was barely functional — its churches neglected, its streets dangerous, its population reduced by plague and political chaos. Gregory died of malaria on March 27, 1378, barely a year after his return.
The conclave that followed was the most consequential election in the history of the Catholic Church. The Roman mob surrounded the building, shouting demands for an Italian pope — or at least a Roman one. The cardinals, most of them French, elected Bartolomeo Prignano, the Archbishop of Bari, who took the name Urban VI. He was Italian. He was not French. He was also, by multiple contemporary accounts, psychologically unstable — abrasive, paranoid, and given to explosive rages that alienated the very cardinals who had elected him.
Within months, the French cardinals fled Rome, declared Urban’s election invalid on the grounds that it had been coerced by the mob, and elected one of their own — Robert of Geneva, a man with a reputation for military brutality — as Clement VII. Clement returned to Avignon. The Western Schism had begun. Christendom now had two popes, two courts, two colleges of cardinals, and two competing claims to the keys of Saint Peter.
The Council of Pisa Makes It Worse — Three Popes, One Church
Europe divided along political lines. France, Scotland, Castile, and Aragon recognized the Avignon pope. England, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, and most of Italy recognized the Roman pope. The schism persisted through successive popes and antipopes on both sides — each new election deepening the divide, each excommunication widening the breach.
In 1409, a group of cardinals from both obediences convened the Council of Pisa to resolve the crisis. Their solution was to depose both existing popes and elect a third. The council chose Alexander V, who died within a year and was succeeded by John XXIII — a man later described by the historian Edward Gibbon as “the most profligate of mankind.” The Roman and Avignon popes refused to recognize the Pisan line. Christendom now had three popes simultaneously, each claiming legitimacy, each excommunicating the other two.
The resolution came at the Council of Constance (1414–1418), convened by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. The council deposed all three claimants and elected Martin V in 1417, reunifying the papacy after thirty-nine years of schism. The institutional damage was permanent. The spectacle of multiple popes cursing each other across Europe had shattered the myth of papal infallibility in the minds of millions. The conciliar movement — the idea that a council of the Church held authority superior to the pope — gained intellectual legitimacy. John Wycliffe and his Lollard followers in England denied papal authority entirely. Jan Hus in Bohemia preached reform so radical that the Council of Constance burned him at the stake in 1415, producing a martyr whose followers would fight a decade of wars against papal armies. The road from Avignon to Wittenberg, where Martin Luther nailed his theses to a church door in 1517, is not a metaphor. It is a direct line of institutional cause and effect, and every mile of it passes through the halls of the Palais des Papes.
The Pont Saint-Bénézet — The Most Famous Half-Bridge on Earth
A Shepherd Boy, a Boulder, and a 900-Meter Miracle
The bridge predates the popes. In 1177, a twelve-year-old shepherd from the mountains of the Ardèche named Bénézet walked into Avignon and announced that Jesus Christ had appeared to him in a vision and commanded him to build a bridge over the Rhône. The bishop took him for a lunatic. The crowd jeered. The bishop issued a challenge: if God had truly sent him, let him prove it by lifting a massive boulder and throwing it into the river.
The legend holds that Bénézet lifted the stone — a block so heavy that thirty men could not move it — onto his shoulders and hurled it into the Rhône, where it became the foundation for the first pier. The crowd, witnessing what they believed to be a miracle, was convinced. Wealthy patrons formed the Bridge-Building Brotherhood (Frères Pontifes) to fund the construction. Bénézet became a fundraiser of extraordinary charisma — not the engineer of the bridge but its prophet, the man who convinced an entire city to attempt the impossible.
The bridge took eight years to build. Completed around 1185, it stretched 920 meters across both channels of the Rhône on twenty-two stone arches — the only fixed river crossing between Lyon and the Mediterranean Sea. It was four meters wide, too narrow for two carts to pass, but wide enough to transform Avignon from a regional town into one of the most strategically important crossings in southern Europe. Bénézet died around 1184, before the bridge was finished. He was buried in a chapel built onto one of the piers — the Chapel of Saint Nicholas, dedicated to the patron saint of mariners — his body interred in the structure his faith had conjured from the river.
Flood, War, Collapse, and the Song That Made It Famous
The bridge was destroyed during the siege of Avignon in 1226, a casualty of the Albigensian Crusade — the military campaign launched by the papacy and the French crown against the Cathar heretics of southern France. It was rebuilt in stone by 1234, grander than before, its twenty-two arches carrying pilgrims, merchants, and eventually the cardinals of the papal court who commuted across the Rhône to their residences in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon — escaping, as Petrarch noted, the stench and pollution of the papal city itself.
The Rhône did not cooperate. Floods damaged the bridge repeatedly: arches collapsed in 1603, 1605, 1633, and most catastrophically in 1669, when a major flood swept away several spans and scattered the remaining structure. The city patched what it could, replacing stone arches with wooden footbridges, but the cost of maintaining a 920-meter crossing over one of Europe’s most violent rivers exceeded what Avignon could bear. By the 1670s, the bridge was abandoned. Bénézet’s remains were removed from the chapel in 1674, when the last standing arches threatened to collapse around them. His relics were transferred to the Church of the Célestins, then to Saint-Didier, where they remain.
Today, four arches survive — consolidated in the 19th century, standing in a line that ends abruptly over open water. The bridge goes nowhere. It is the most famous incomplete structure in France, known worldwide not for its engineering or its history but for a nursery rhyme: “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse” — on the bridge of Avignon, everyone is dancing, everyone is dancing in a circle. The song, popularized in an 1853 operetta by Adolphe Adam, became an international children’s standard. The irony is architectural: the bridge was four meters wide. No one danced on it. The dancing, if it happened, took place sous le pont — under the bridge, on the Île de la Barthelasse, where taverns and guinguettes operated beneath the surviving arches in the 19th century. The most famous song about the bridge gets the preposition wrong.
The bridge is the structural metaphor for everything Avignon represents: ambition that exceeded the capacity to maintain it, a marvel that collapsed arch by arch over five centuries because no one could afford the upkeep, and a ruin that became more famous broken than it ever was intact.
Visiting Avignon — The Atlas Entry
The Palais des Papes, the Ramparts, and the Rocher des Doms
The Palais des Papes dominates the center of Avignon from its position on the Rocher des Doms, a limestone outcrop above the Rhône. The palace is open daily year-round, with audio guides available in twelve languages and a digital tablet tour that overlays historical reconstructions onto the stripped interiors. Clement VI’s frescoes in the chapels of St. Martial and Sts. John are the visual highlight — the rest of the palace was stripped of its furnishings during the French Revolution, when the building was used as a barracks and a prison, and the interiors are now vast, bare stone halls whose emptiness is itself a kind of statement.
The ramparts that ring the old city — 4.3 kilometers of 14th-century wall, largely intact — were built by the popes in the years immediately following their purchase of Avignon. They are walkable in sections and provide the best framing for the relationship between the palace and the city it controlled. The Rocher des Doms park, above the palace, offers panoramic views of the Rhône, the Pont Saint-Bénézet, and the Tour Philippe-le-Bel on the far bank in Villeneuve — the French fortress built to guard the opposite end of the bridge.
The Pont Saint-Bénézet charges a separate entry fee. Visitors walk the four surviving arches to their abrupt end over the water — a strange experience, standing on a bridge that stops mid-river, looking at the empty space where eighteen more arches once carried the road to the other side. The Chapel of Saint Nicholas, built onto the second pier, retains its Romanesque lower level and a Gothic upper floor reduced to the width of a corridor by the chapel’s position on the bridge.
Avignon is accessible by TGV from Paris (2 hours 40 minutes) and Marseille (35 minutes). The Festival d’Avignon, founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar, is the largest performing arts festival in France — held every July, it transforms the palace courtyard and dozens of venues across the city into stages for theatre, dance, and performance. The festival is the modern answer to the question of what Avignon is for now that the popes are gone: a city that once hosted the spiritual capital of Western civilization now hosts its largest annual experiment in live performance.
A City That Stole the Papacy and Kept the Walls
Standing in the Grand Tinel — the banqueting hall where six conclaves elected the men who claimed to speak for God — a visitor confronts a specific and uncomfortable irony. The institution that built this palace preached poverty. The men who dined in this hall wore the robes of an order founded by a carpenter’s son who owned nothing. The fortress that protected them from the world was built with revenue extracted from the faithful through a system of taxes, fees, indulgences, and ecclesiastical appointments that Petrarch and his contemporaries recognized as corrupt and that later generations would identify as one of the proximate causes of the Reformation.
Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome — the fortress the popes built as their escape route from the Vatican — is the architectural sibling of the Palais des Papes. Both are buildings that reveal what the papacy actually feared: not God’s judgment but the mob’s. The Avignon palace is the more honest of the two. It does not pretend to be anything other than what it is — a fortress for an institution under siege, built by men who understood that their authority rested on something more fragile than divine right.
The bridge, the palace, and the walls tell the same story from different angles. The bridge was ambition that could not be sustained — a 920-meter crossing that the city maintained for four centuries before admitting it could not afford another repair. The palace was ambition that succeeded too well — a building so permanent that it outlasted the purpose for which it was built and now stands as a museum to its own obsolescence. The walls remain because walls are the last thing a city tears down. Avignon kept its ramparts the way a retired soldier keeps his uniform: not because he expects to wear it again, but because it reminds him of who he used to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the popes move to Avignon?
The papal court moved to Avignon in 1309 following a prolonged conflict between the papacy and the French crown. After agents of King Philip IV of France assaulted Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303, the subsequent conclave — under heavy French pressure — elected the Archbishop of Bordeaux as Pope Clement V. Clement refused to travel to Rome, which was politically unstable and physically dangerous, and instead established his court at Avignon, a city that was technically papal territory but effectively under French protection. Seven successive French popes governed from Avignon for sixty-seven years, a period known as the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy.
What is the Palais des Papes and why is it significant?
The Palais des Papes (Palace of the Popes) is the largest Gothic palace in Europe, covering approximately 15,000 square meters in the center of Avignon. It was built in two phases: the austere Old Palace under Pope Benedict XII (beginning ~1335) and the opulent New Palace under Pope Clement VI (beginning ~1342). The palace served as the seat of the papacy during the Avignon period and hosted six papal conclaves. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most visited monuments in France, though its interiors were largely stripped during the French Revolution when it was used as a barracks and prison.
What caused the Western Schism?
The Western Schism (1378–1417) began after Pope Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome and died in 1378. The subsequent conclave, pressured by a Roman mob demanding an Italian pope, elected Urban VI. Urban’s erratic and aggressive behavior alienated the French cardinals, who declared his election invalid and elected an antipope, Clement VII, who returned to Avignon. For thirty-nine years, rival popes governed from Rome and Avignon, with European nations divided in their allegiance. The crisis deepened when a third pope was elected at the Council of Pisa in 1409. The schism was resolved at the Council of Constance in 1417 with the election of Martin V, but the damage to papal authority was permanent.
Why is the Pont d’Avignon broken?
The Pont Saint-Bénézet was originally a 920-meter bridge with twenty-two arches, built between 1177 and 1185 — the only fixed crossing of the Rhône between Lyon and the Mediterranean. Repeated floods on the Rhône destroyed arches throughout the medieval and early modern periods (notably in 1226, 1603, 1605, 1633, and 1669), and the city replaced damaged sections with temporary wooden structures. By the late 17th century, the cost of maintaining the bridge exceeded what Avignon could afford, and it was permanently abandoned. Today, four arches survive, ending abruptly over the river.
What is the song “Sur le Pont d’Avignon” about?
“Sur le Pont d’Avignon” is a French children’s song about people dancing on the bridge of Avignon. The modern version dates from an 1853 operetta by composer Adolphe Adam and became an international nursery rhyme. The song contains a geographical inaccuracy: the bridge was only four meters wide, far too narrow for dancing in circles. Historians believe the dancing took place sous (under) the bridge, on the banks of the Île de la Barthelasse, where taverns operated beneath the surviving arches in the 19th century.
Can you visit Avignon year-round?
Yes. The Palais des Papes and the Pont Saint-Bénézet are open daily throughout the year, with hours varying seasonally. The old city within the medieval ramparts is compact and walkable. The annual Festival d’Avignon, held every July, is the largest performing arts festival in France and transforms the city into a major cultural destination. Avignon is accessible by TGV from Paris (approximately 2 hours 40 minutes) and from Marseille (35 minutes).
Sources
* [The Popes at Avignon, 1305–1378] — Guillaume Mollat, translated by Janet Love, Thomas Nelson and Sons (1963)
* [A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present] — John W. O’Malley, Rowman & Littlefield (2010)
* [The Babylonian Captivity of the Church] — Martin Luther (1520), in Luther’s Works, Vol. 36
* [Petrarch’s Letters (Epistolae Familiares and Sine Nomine)] — Francesco Petrarca, various translations; Sonnet 114 (“De l’empia Babilonia”)
* [The Western Schism and the Council of Constance] — Louise Ropes Loomis (trans.), Columbia University Press (1961)
* [Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt, 1320–1450] — George Holmes, Blackwell (2000)
* [The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378] — Sophia Menache, Oxford University Press (1998)
* [Chirurgia Magna] — Guy de Chauliac (1363), primary source on Black Death medical response in Avignon
* [The Pont Saint-Bénézet: Archaeological and Historical Study] — Dominique Vingtain and interdisciplinary research team, Avignon (2010–2016)
* [Palais des Papes: Official Guide and Historical Documentation] — Avignon Tourism / UNESCO World Heritage Site records
* [Clement VI and the Black Death] — Diana Wood, in The Church and the Black Death, Cambridge University Press (1989)
* [The Trial of the Templars] — Malcolm Barber, Cambridge University Press (1978, revised 2006)
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