Pope Clement V

Bertrand de Got was born around 1264 at Uzeste in Gascony, a region of southwestern France that was then held by the English crown as part of the Duchy of Aquitaine ^[1]. His family belonged to the minor nobility of the area, and its connections proved useful throughout his career. His elder brother Bérard de Got rose to become Archbishop of Lyon and later a cardinal, opening doors that the younger Bertrand would walk through with notable speed ^[2].

As a younger son destined for the Church, Bertrand received a thorough education in the law. He studied arts at Toulouse and then canon and civil law at Orléans and Bologna, the two most respected legal faculties in Europe at the time ^[1]. This legal training shaped his entire outlook. Contemporaries and later historians alike describe him as a canonist first, a man who approached the great crises of his pontificate as problems of procedure and jurisdiction rather than as tests of raw authority ^[3].

His early career followed a conventional path for a well-connected cleric. He held canonries at Bordeaux and elsewhere, served as vicar general to his brother in Lyon, and acted as a chaplain to Pope Boniface VIII, who made him Bishop of Comminges in 1295 ^[2]. Anyone studying who was Pope Clement V before his election finds a diligent administrator moving steadily upward through the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Gascony and beyond.

In 1299 Boniface VIII promoted Bertrand to the archbishopric of Bordeaux, one of the most sensitive posts in western Christendom ^[1]. The see lay in territory ruled by King Edward I of England, yet its clergy and people were culturally French, and relations between England and France were frequently hostile. Bertrand managed the balancing act well. He remained on workable terms with both crowns during the bitter quarrel between Boniface VIII and King Philip IV of France, a conflict that ended with the humiliation of the pope at Anagni in 1303 ^[3].

Boniface died shortly after that outrage, and his successor Benedict XI lived only eight months. The conclave that gathered at Perugia in 1304 deadlocked for nearly a year between factions supporting and opposing the memory of Boniface ^[4]. The cardinals eventually reached outside their own college for a compromise, and on June 5, 1305 they elected the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name Clement V ^[1].

The choice carried consequences no one fully foresaw. Clement was crowned at Lyon on November 14, 1305, in the presence of Philip IV, rather than traveling to Rome ^[2]. During the coronation procession a wall crowded with spectators collapsed; the pope was thrown from his horse, a jewel was lost from his tiara, and the Duke of Brittany was among those killed. Chroniclers treated the accident as an omen for the pontificate that followed ^[4]. Citing disorder in Italy and the press of business with France, Clement never crossed the Alps. After several years of moving among French towns, he settled his court at Avignon in 1309, beginning what later critics called the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy ^[3].

No episode defines Pope Clement V facts and reputation more than the destruction of the Knights Templar. The military order, founded in the early twelfth century to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land, had grown into an international institution with extensive estates and banking operations. After the fall of Acre in 1291 it lost its original purpose, and its wealth attracted the attention of Philip IV, whose treasury was chronically empty ^[5].

On October 13, 1307, Philip's officials arrested the Templars throughout France in a coordinated dawn operation, charging them with heresy, blasphemy, and obscene initiation rites. Many knights confessed under torture, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay ^[5]. Clement protested that the king had usurped a judgment belonging to the Church, and in November 1307 he issued the bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae, ordering all Christian rulers to arrest the Templars and place their property under Church control, an attempt to reclaim jurisdiction over a process he could not stop ^[6].

The struggle between pope and king dragged on for years, entangled with Philip's demand for a posthumous heresy trial of Boniface VIII, a threat Clement desperately wished to avoid ^[3]. The matter came to a head at the Council of Vienne, which opened in October 1311. When the assembled prelates showed reluctance to condemn the order on the evidence presented, Clement acted on his own authority. By the bull Vox in excelso of March 22, 1312, he abolished the Templars, carefully stating that he did so by way of provision rather than definitive judicial sentence, since the charges had not been proven ^[6]. A second bull, Ad providam, transferred most Templar property to the Knights Hospitaller ^[5]. In March 1314 Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney, brought out to hear their sentence of perpetual imprisonment, publicly retracted their confessions. Philip had them burned as relapsed heretics on an island in the Seine that same evening, without reference to the pope ^[5].

Any balanced account of Pope Clement V achievements must look past the Templar affair to his administrative record. He was a legislator of real consequence. The decrees of the Council of Vienne, together with his own decretals, were gathered into a collection known as the Clementines or Clementine Constitutions, formally published by his successor John XXII in 1317 and incorporated into the standard corpus of canon law used for six centuries ^[7].

Clement showed a genuine commitment to learning. At Vienne the council ordered the establishment of chairs in Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean at the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca, a measure intended to aid missionary work and biblical scholarship ^[7]. He founded a university at Perugia in 1308, and in the same year issued the charter that established a university at his old ecclesiastical home, contributing to the growth of legal and theological studies in southern Europe ^[1].

His financial and personnel policies were more controversial. Clement expanded papal taxation of clerical income, and he named relatives and fellow Gascons to lucrative offices on a scale that even contemporaries found startling. Of the twenty-four cardinals he created, the great majority were French, and several were his kinsmen ^[2]. This transformation of the College of Cardinals guaranteed a succession of French popes at Avignon and drew fierce criticism from Italian writers. Dante placed a thinly veiled Clement among the simoniacs in the Inferno, calling him a lawless shepherd from the west ^[4].

Clement suffered throughout his pontificate from a painful chronic illness, described by contemporaries as a disease of the stomach or bowels, which modern writers have often suggested may have been cancer ^[2]. His poor health helps explain his itinerant habits: he moved frequently among towns in Gascony and the Comtat Venaissin, often staying in Dominican priories, and periodically withdrew from business altogether. At Avignon he never built a fixed palace, lodging instead at the Dominican convent; the great papal palace there was the work of his successors ^[3].

Family loyalty ran deep in him. He enriched his nephews with church offices and left substantial sums to relatives in his will, behavior that fed accusations of nepotism and greed ^[2]. Later chroniclers circulated a story of a romantic attachment to Brunissende de Foix, though historians treat the tale as unverified gossip rather than established fact ^[4]. What the documents do show is a careful, anxious, and often ill man, more comfortable with legal texts than confrontation, who preferred delay and compromise to open rupture with the powerful.

He was not without pastoral and diplomatic energy. Clement worked to reconcile England and France, mediating in the disputes between Edward I, then Edward II, and Philip IV ^[1]. He also pursued the dream of a new crusade, imposing a tithe on clerical incomes for the purpose, and corresponded with the Mongol Ilkhanate about a possible alliance against the Mamluks, though no expedition materialized in his lifetime ^[6].

The Council of Vienne of 1311 to 1312 was the summit of Clement's pontificate and also its heaviest burden. Besides the Templar question, the council addressed Church reform, condemned certain teachings associated with the Beguines and the writings attributed to Peter John Olivi, and handled the delicate memory of Boniface VIII. Clement succeeded in quashing the proposed posthumous trial of Boniface, though at the price of concessions to Philip, including absolution for those involved in the assault at Anagni ^[3].

In his final years Clement was drawn into imperial politics. He had supported the election of Henry VII of Luxembourg as King of the Romans and approved his journey to Rome, where Henry was crowned emperor in 1313 by cardinals acting on the pope's behalf. When Henry then clashed with Robert of Naples, a papal ally, Clement issued rulings asserting papal superiority over the empire during a vacancy, positions later gathered in the constitution Pastoralis cura ^[7].

His health collapsed early in 1314. Hoping to reach his native Gascony, he left Avignon but got no farther than Roquemaure on the Rhône, where he died on April 20, 1314, barely a month after the execution of Jacques de Molay ^[1]. Legend later claimed the Grand Master had summoned both pope and king to divine judgment from the flames, a story made famous by chroniclers and modern novelists, but it appears only in accounts written after the events ^[5]. Clement was buried, at his own wish, in the collegiate church he had endowed at Uzeste, where his tomb, damaged by Huguenots in the sixteenth century, still stands ^[2].

Assessments of Clement V have rarely been gentle. For Italian contemporaries he was the pope who abandoned Rome; for admirers of the Templars he was the weak accomplice of a rapacious king; for reformers he embodied nepotism and fiscal exaction. Modern scholarship, led by studies such as Sophia Menache's full-length biography, has complicated that picture, presenting a capable canon lawyer confronting a monarchy stronger than any pope of his era could safely defy ^[3].

His structural legacy was enormous whether or not it was intended. By settling at Avignon and packing the College of Cardinals with Frenchmen, Clement set the conditions for the seven Avignon pontificates that followed, from 1309 to 1377, an era that changed papal administration, finance, and diplomacy permanently ^[4]. The Clementine Constitutions remained part of the Church's legal corpus until the twentieth century, and the university foundations and language chairs he sponsored outlived every controversy of his reign ^[7].

Interest in his pontificate has never faded. The dramatic fall of the Templars keeps any Pope Clement V biography tied to one of the most retold episodes of the Middle Ages, the subject of scholarly monographs by historians such as Malcolm Barber and of endless popular speculation ^[5]. In 2001 the discovery in the Vatican Secret Archives of the Chinon Parchment, recording that Clement's commissioners had absolved the Templar leaders of heresy in 1308 while the order's fate was still undecided, renewed debate about how far this cautious lawyer pope had tried, and failed, to protect the men his ally on the French throne was determined to destroy ^[8].