Locked in one room, and then their meals got smaller

AVIGNON, France, September 11, 1362 AD — Pope Innocent VI died today at Avignon, a city in France. He had been pope for ten years, and he spent every one of them in France. Popes had lived at Avignon since 1305 AD, when Pope Clement V moved the popes’ home out of Rome. That was 57 years ago. Now the cardinals had to choose the next pope, and settle whether he would stay in France or go back to Rome.

One room, one door, smaller dinners

The choice belonged to the cardinals, the whole group of them, and to nobody else. Almost every one of them was a Frenchman.

They had to make the choice locked in one room. A rule made in 1274 AD put the cardinals together in a single room, with no curtain and no wall down the middle. The room was shut so that nobody could go in or out without being seen. A cardinal who sent a message to anyone outside lost his job and was excommunicated.

Then there was the food. If they had not chosen a pope after three days, they got one dish at each meal. After five more days, they got bread, wine and water.

To win, a man needed two thirds of the votes, and his own vote didn’t count. But no law said the new pope had to be one of the cardinals.

The pope who never went to Rome

Pope Innocent VI had been Étienne Aubert, a teacher of law at Toulouse. He was elected pope at Avignon on December 18, 1352 AD.

Before that election, the cardinals had all signed a written promise. Whichever of them became pope would share his power and his money with the rest. Aubert signed it, but he added a condition. One of the first things he did as pope was to declare the whole promise worthless. He said it cut down a power God had given the papacy.

He spent his ten years trying to clean up the papal court. Churchmen had come to Avignon hoping to be given better jobs. They were ordered back to the churches they were supposed to be looking after. He cut the fancy spending in his own household, and told the cardinals to cut theirs.

Avignon was not a safe place either. Armed bands got close enough to the city that Pope Innocent VI built new walls around it. Before the walls were done he was attacked, and he had to pay the attackers an enormous ransom to go away. He talked about going to Rome, or at least visiting it, and he never went.

Far off in Siena, in Italy, a dyer named Giacomo Benincasa lived near the fountain of Fontebranda. His daughter Saint Catherine of Siena was fifteen that summer. In their house on the Strada dell’Oca, wood was kept burning all day for the dyes.

Nobody in the room could win

The cardinals got stuck. They disliked each other too much for any one of them to be elected. So they used the freedom the law left them, and picked a man who wasn’t a cardinal at all.

Guillaume de Grimoard, the abbot of Saint-Victor at Marseilles, was carrying a message from Pope Innocent VI to Queen Giovanna of Naples. He was at Florence, on his way there, when the news 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.”

He was on his way back from Naples when the cardinals’ message caught him. He reached Marseilles on October 28 and entered Avignon three days later. He was made pope on November 6, 1362 AD. He took the name Urban because, he said, every pope who had used that name had been a saint.

Pope Urban V was fifty-three, and he belonged to a religious order whose clothing he went on wearing as pope. In Italy, people read the name he chose as pointing towards Rome.