The Avignon Papacy

Clement V, elected in 1305 and never once entering Rome, settled the curia at Avignon, and for seven decades the successors of Peter ruled from a fortress palace beside the Rhone. Petrarch, collecting his mail there, branded it the Babylon of the West. The label stuck because the substance was real: seven consecutive French popes, a college of cardinals stacked with Frenchmen, and a papacy that Europe increasingly read as a French chaplaincy.

Avignon was not idle; it perfected papal administration and finance beyond anything Rome had managed. But legitimacy is a matter of place as well as law. Catherine of Siena told Gregory XI as much to his face, and in 1377 he brought the papacy home to Rome, where he died within the year, on the eve of catastrophe.