The “ Babylonian Captivity ”. The severest difficulties faced by the medieval church involved the papacy. The most extreme and inflexible advocate of papal authority, Boniface VIII, initiated a struggle with the French king, Philip IV, over Philip’s attempts to tax and judge the clergy. After Boniface issued the bull Unam sanctam (“One Holy”), ...
In 1303, mercenaries in French pay and under French leadership harassed and humiliated the pope with impunity, arresting Boniface at his family palace in Anagni. Although freed by the people of the town, Boniface never recovered from the shock and died shortly afterward. The aftermath of this “outrage of Anagni” was the desertion ...
Once at the council, however, Hus was arrested and imprisoned. He was tried for heresy (particular ly because of his doctrine of the church) and condemned, and on July 6, 1415, he was burned at the stake.
After Boniface issued the bull Unam sanctam (“One Holy”), which asserted the unity of the church and the authority of the pope over kings, Philip rallied the people of France and accused Boniface of blasphemy, murder, sodomy, and other crimes.
The first of several reform councils was held at Pisa in 1409 to deal with the schism and with many other problems of discipline and doctrine.
The aftermath of this “outrage of Anagni” was the desertion of Rome by the popes and their long residence (1309–77) at Avignon (now in France), a chapter in church history called the “Babylonian Captivity” after the 70 years of Jewish exile in Babylon in the 6th century bc. Papal Palace in Avignon.
Between them, Ockham and Marsilius used almost all the arguments against the papacy that have ever been devised. Condemned more than once, Marsilius had little immediate effect or influence, but during the Great Schism (1378–1417) and later, in the 16th century, he and Ockham had their turn.
One important issue during the Papacy of John XXII (born Jaques Dueze in Cahors, and previously Archbishop in Avignon), was his conflict with Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor. The latter refuted the right of the pope to install the Emperor by coronation.
In the history of the Roman Catholic Church, the Avignon Papacy was the period from 1309 to 1377 during which seven popes, all French, resided in Avignon: In 1378, Gregory XI moved the papal residence back to Rome and died there. Due to a dispute over the subsequent election, a faction of cardinals set up an antipope back in Avignon. This was the period of difficulty from 1378 to 1417 which Catholic scholars refer to as the “ Western schism ” or, “the great controversy of the antipopes” (also called “the second great schism” by some secular and Protestant historians), when parties within the Catholic church were divided in their allegiances among the various claimants to the office of pope. The Council of Constance in 1417 finally resolved the controversy.
Overview. The Papacy in the Late Middle Ages had a major secular role in addition to its spiritual role . The conflict between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor basically boiled down to a dispute over which of them was the leader of Christendom in secular matters.
/ Wikimedia Commons. The most influential decision in the reign of Pope Gregory XI (1370-1378) was the return to Rome in 1378.
The relationship between the Papacy and France changed drastically over the course of the fourteenth century. Starting with open conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philippe IV of France, it turned to cooperation from 1305 to 1342, and finally to a Papacy under strong influence by the French throne up to 1378. Such partisanship of the Papacy was one of the reasons for the dropping esteem for the institution, which in turn was one of the reasons for the schism from 1378-1417. In the period of the Schism, the power struggle in the Papacy became a battlefield of the major powers, with France supporting the Pope in Avignon and England supporting the Pope in Rome. At the end of the century, still in the state of schism, the Papacy had lost most of its direct political power, and the nation states of France and England were established as the main powers in Europe.