The Popes of Avignon: A Century of Exile 3999906033

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n 1309, anarchy in Italy forced Pope Clement V to move the seat of the papacy

—for the first and only time in history— away from Rome, to the city of Avignon in the south of France. Seven successive popes remained there in exile for the next seventy years, and Avignon came to be, albeit briefly, one of the great capitals of the world. And soon after Pope Gregory XI had returned to Rome in 1377, the Great Schism occurred, and Avignon became home to the antipopes for another nearly thirty years, rivals and enemies of the reestablished Roman papacy. The Popes of Avignon is a remarkable and stunning tale, bringing together the sweeping events surrounding the so-called broader story of fourteenth-century Europe. It was a dark time of fear, ferocity, and religious agony, which saw the suppression of the Knights Templar and the heretical Cathars, the first onslaught of the plague, and the beginning of the Hundred Years War. But it was also a shining time of castles and cathedrals, beauty and art and spiritual fervor, the decades in which Giotto and Simone

Martini

painted;

Boccaccio,

Chaucer, and Wyclif wrote; Meister Eckhart preached sermons; and Julian of Norwich had her visions. And while the papal flight from Rome was fiercely castigated by Dante in The Divine Comedy, the enigmatic figure of Petrarch, the great poet and scholar, loomed angrily over papal Avignon. Like a fine medieval tapestry, The Popes of Avignon weaves together the dramatic lives of the popes in exile, the great occurrences of the era, and the wondrous Provencal city of Avignon itself, thei illuminating one of the most ti

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seminal periods in the history o

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the beginning transition from

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Ages to the Renaissance.

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Public Libra in, MA 02116

“Babylonian captivity" of the popes and the

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