Avignon Papacy

Also called: Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy

From 1309 to 1377 the papacy left Rome and resided at Avignon in southern France under the influence of the French king — likened to the Babylonian captivity of the ancient Jews.

After Anagni, the Frenchman Clement V was elected pope in 1305. Instead of going to Rome he settled in 1309 at Avignon on the Rhône, and seven popes, all French, stayed there for nearly seventy years. At Philip IV’s demand Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar (1312). Petrarch and others likened this to the deportation of the ancient Jews to Babylon, calling it the “Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy”.

The papal court built a huge palace and organised its taxation, but its authority fell amid complaints that the pope was in the French king’s hands and amid corruption such as the sale of church offices. Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377, but the Great Schism broke out the following year. Around this time King Chungseon of Goryeo, living in the Yuan capital, founded the Hall of Ten Thousand Books there (1314), where Yi Je-hyeon and others met Yuan scholars.