ABSTRACT
A combination of events led to the removal of the papal court to Avignon in 1309. Avignon was then a town divided by the river Rhône into the old, German-imperial part on the east bank, and a new, French, part on the west bank. The popes held the formal lordship over the German part, together with the small County of Venasque that surrounded the town, in fief of the counts of Provence who happened to be the kings of Naples from the French House of Anjou. In 1348, the popes bought these rights from the count – then countess, actually – after which Avignon and Venasque became a papal enclave between France and the Holy Roman Empire. The decision, in 1309, of Pope Clement V (1305-1314) to move to Provence was connected with the denouement of the Boniface VIII affair. Clement was anxious to prevent the French king from going ahead with his plan of having Boniface posthumously declared a heretic. He found it completely unacceptable that someone who had been invested with the keys of St Peter would ever be called an enemy of the faith, but he paid an outrageous price for Philip’s acquiescence: he agreed to the persecution and eventual condemnation of the Knights Templar. After the fall of the last Christian bulwark in Palestine at the end of the thirteenth century this extremely wealthy military order had established its headquarters in Paris and successfully entered the banking business. The
PLATE 12.1 Pope Boniface VIII, statue in copper and
bronze on wood, 2.45 m high, c.1300 on show on the
façade of the Palazzo Pubblico of Bologna.
