Pope Clement V
Clement V moved the papacy to France, destroyed the Templars for a king who owed them money, and is the reason the church spent seventy years outside Rome. He was a Gascon archbishop, elected in 1305 after an eleven-month conclave deadlocked between French and Italian factions, and he never went to Rome at all. He was crowned at Lyon, moved between French residences for four years, and settled at Avignon in 1309 - technically not French territory, practically inside the French sphere, and intended as temporary. His successors stayed for sixty-eight years, in a period Italian writers called the Babylonian captivity, and the French crown acquired a degree of influence over the papacy that it had spent two centuries failing to obtain by force. The price of his election was paid to the king who had secured it. In 1307 that king had every Templar in France arrested on a single morning on charges of heresy, blasphemy and obscenity, extracted confessions under torture, and burned fifty-four of them in a field outside Paris. The order was the wealthiest in Christendom, it answered only to the pope, and the crown owed it a great deal of money. Clement resisted for two years, opened his own inquiry which found the order not guilty, and then suppressed it anyway in 1312 by administrative provision rather than condemnation - the distinction preserving the letter of justice while conceding the substance. He also annulled the bull by which his predecessor had claimed supremacy over kings, and posthumously exonerated the king who had had that predecessor assaulted. He died in 1314, weeks after the last Templar grand master was burned on an island in the Seine, and the papacy he left was richer, more bureaucratic, French in personnel and no longer Roman in any sense that mattered.
- Lived: 1264 CE – 1314 CE
- Nationality: Papal
- Roles: head_of_state, religious_leader
