Pope Clement VI

Pierre Roger reigned as Clement VI from 1342 to 1352, the fourth of the Avignon popes and the one whose pontificate was defined by the Black Death. He was a Benedictine from the Limousin, a celebrated preacher and a former chancellor of France, and he brought a court manner to the papacy that his predecessors had avoided. He spent enormously. He bought the city of Avignon outright from Queen Joanna of Naples in 1348, extended the papal palace, and recruited composers and theorists of the new Ars Nova music to his chapel. He said openly that his predecessors had not known how to be pope. The plague reached Avignon in early 1348 and killed perhaps half the city. He remained, and his conduct during it is the best of his record. He commissioned physicians to perform autopsies to understand the disease. He granted remission of sins to all who died of it. Above all he issued two bulls in 1348 forbidding the killing of Jews, who were being massacred across the Rhineland on the accusation of poisoning wells, stating plainly that they were dying of the plague like everyone else. He sheltered Jewish refugees in Avignon. The bulls were widely ignored, but they were issued. He also entrenched French control of the church, creating cardinals almost exclusively from his own countrymen, which made the return of the papacy to Rome harder and the schism that followed more likely. He bought Avignon for eighty thousand florins, and the papacy kept the city until the French Revolution. His nephew later reigned as Gregory XI, the pope who finally returned the curia to Rome.

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