Pope Innocent VI dies at Avignon, leaving the papacy's home in question

AVIGNON, France, September 11, 1362 AD — Pope Innocent VI died at Avignon today, in the tenth year of a reign he spent entirely in France. He leaves the cardinals a vacancy, and with it the question the papal court on the Rhône has carried unanswered for fifty-seven years: whether the next pope stays here or goes back to Rome.

The choice belongs to the Sacred College, the whole body of cardinals, and to nobody else — and almost all of them are Frenchmen. The popes have lived at Avignon since 1305 AD, when Pope Clement V moved the papal residence out of Rome at the urging of King Philip the Fair of France. Every one of Pope Clement V’s successors has been French by birth and sympathy, and it is out of that College that the legates who govern the Church’s territories in Italy are chosen.

They will make the choice locked in one room. Since Pope Gregory X’s decree at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 AD the electors have sat together in a single room, without partition or curtain. The room is closed so that no one can go in or out unseen, and a cardinal who sends word to anyone outside loses his office and is excommunicated. If they have not elected after three days they are cut to one dish at each meal, and after five more days to bread, wine and water. A candidate needs two thirds of the votes, not counting his own, and no law requires the cardinals to elect one of their own number.

Pope Innocent VI was Étienne Aubert, a professor of civil law at Toulouse who had risen to the highest judicial post there before he entered the Church. He was elected at Avignon on December 18, 1352 AD. The cardinals who elected him had first bound themselves by a written pact, the earliest of its kind that can be traced with certainty, under which whichever of them became pope would share his power and his revenues with the College. Aubert signed it with a reservation, and one of his first acts as pope was to declare it null, on the ground that it cut down a power God had given the papacy.

He spent the ten years that followed trying to reform the papal court. Clergy who had drifted to Avignon in search of promotion were ordered back to the benefices they were supposed to be serving, under threat of excommunication. He cut the luxury of his own household and told the cardinals to cut theirs.

Italy cost him more. In 1353 AD he sent Cardinal Gil de Albornoz, a Spaniard, into the Church’s Italian territories with unlimited authority to take them back from the lords who had helped themselves to them. It took eight years of fighting and bargaining, and by the summer of last year it was substantially done.

Avignon was not safe either. Mercenary bands loose in Provence came near enough that Pope Innocent VI built new walls around the city, and before the walls were finished he was attacked and had to buy the attackers off with an enormous ransom. He spoke of going to Rome, or at least of visiting it, and he never went.

At Siena, in the woolworkers’ quarter near the fountain of Fontebranda, the dyer Giacomo Benincasa had buried his married daughter Bonaventura the month before. She died in childbirth in August, and the Dominican friars of the city entered her in the necrology of their convent as the daughter of Giacomo the dyer of Fontebranda. Another of his daughters, Saint Catherine of Siena, was fifteen that summer and lived in the house on the Strada dell’Oca, where wood was kept burning all day for the dyes.

The news went south. Guillaume de Grimoard, abbot of Saint-Victor at Marseilles, was carrying an embassy from Pope Innocent VI to Queen Giovanna of Naples. He was at Florence, on his way there, when word of the Pope’s death reached Italy. Grimoard said when he heard it: “I dare to say that if, by the grace of God, I were to see a Pope who would come to Italy, to the true papal seat, and would beat down the tyrants, I should be happy, if I had to die the next day.”

The conclave deadlocked. Rivalries inside the Sacred College made the election of any one of its own members almost impossible, so the cardinals used the freedom the law left them and chose a man who held no cardinal’s hat. The cardinals’ message reached Grimoard on his way back from Naples. He came to Marseilles on October 28 and entered Avignon three days later. He was consecrated on November 6, 1362 AD, and took the name Urban because, he said, all the popes who had borne it had been saints.

Pope Urban V was fifty-three, a Benedictine who went on wearing his order’s habit as pope, and one of the leading canon lawyers of his day. In Italy the choice of name was read as pointing towards Rome.