Christ's Faithful People
Christ's Faithful People
1305 - 1314 AD
When Clement was on his solemn procession to be crowned, a wall crashed down on the cavalcade, knocking the Pope off his horse, sending his tiara flying. When the tiara was recovered, its most precious jewel, a ruby, was missing. This crash was a fitting prelude to a reign which began a time of troubles for the papacy.
After Benedict died, the cardinals wrangled for almost a year before Orsini and Colonna interests agreed on a compromise candidate, Bertrand de Got. Bertrand had been absent visiting his see of Bordeaux. He accepted, took the name Clement V, and summoned the cardinals to Lyons for his coronation. Born at Villandraut in Gascony in 1264, Bertrand rose steadily in the service of the Church to be archbishop of Bordeaux. Though a friend of Philip IV, he had been loyal to Boniface VIII in his struggle with the French monarch. Naturally, however, he welcomed Benedict's appeasement policy and had renewed his friendship with Philip.
Clement, unwilling to face the trouble of living in turbulent Rome, wandered about France. Finally in 1309 he settled at Avignon, a pleasant little town on the banks of the Rhone. Avignon then belonged not to the king of France but to the king of Naples. It was almost surrounded by the papal territory of the Venaissin, and Clement VI purchased the town itself. Thus started the Avignon "exile" or the "Babylonian Captivity" of the papacy which was to last, with a slight interruption, until 1378. These terms mean simply this period in which the popes lived and held their court at peaceful Avignon and exercised their control of Rome through vicars.
Clement V was terrified by Philip IV a fact of which the monarch was well aware. Philip had his heart set on the condemnation of Boniface VIII as a heretic. He bullied Clement into actually starting a process, but the Pope delayed until to his intense relief Philip told him he could end the affair. The king now had his sights set on living game, the rich order of Knights Templar. The Pope declared Boniface innocent, and then called a general council to meet at Vienne in 1311.
The military Order of the Temple had lost prestige with the final collapse of the crusading kingdom in 1291. Its enormous wealth excited jealous greed. Its international military force was a scandal to the new nationalism and reviving absolutism. Philip seized the French Templars and after a deal of grim work by inquisition torturers secured confessions of all kinds of evil deeds. Clement, evidently not too much impressed by confessions of such dubious value, suppressed the order without condemning it. Its property was to go to the Knights of St. John, but Philip secured the lion's share of the loot in France.
The Council of Vienne was the fifteenth ecumenical council. It censured the errors of a Franciscan, Peter John Olivi, and condemned some wild vagaries associated with the Beghards and Beguines.
Clement V was a canonist of distinction and a man with wide educational interests. He erected universities at Orleans and Perugia. He ordered that chairs of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic should be founded at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. A good-natured man, he was too generous to his relatives and too easy-going with his court. He created a vast preponderance of French cardinals, and when he died on April 20, 1314, French influence was paramount in the papal court.
