Clement V, a Gascon archbishop elected in 1305, never went to Rome. The curia moved to Avignon in 1309, and seven French popes ruled from here in succession — Clement V, John XXII, Benedict XII, Clement VI, Innocent VI, Urban V and Gregory XI — until Gregory XI took the papacy back to Rome in January 1377. Avignon was not then part of France: it belonged to the counts of Provence — the Angevin kings of Naples — and stood beside the Comtat Venaissin, which had been papal territory since 1274. Clement VI bought the town itself from Queen Joanna of Naples in 1348, and it stayed papal property until the French Revolution.
The Palais des Papes was built in two campaigns, from 1335 under Benedict XII and from 1342 under Clement VI, and covers roughly 15,000 m². It is a palace built as a fortress: blank walls, machicolated towers, a single defensible entrance. That was not decoration. The papacy had abandoned an ungovernable Rome, the countryside was crossed by unemployed mercenary companies, and after Gregory XI’s death in 1378 the cardinals elected two popes and the Great Schism split Europe for thirty-nine years. From 1378 to 1403 an Avignon pope held the palace against the Roman one, and in 1398 the palace was besieged with a pope inside it.
The city walls date from the same fear. Innocent VI began them in 1355 against the Great Companies and they were finished under Urban V by 1370: about 4.3 km of curtain, some 35 large towers and dozens of smaller ones, still enclosing the old town on all sides. Few European cities of this size kept their circuit whole; Avignon did because the ring was never demolished for boulevards. Outside the walls, the Pont Saint-Bénézet carried the road over the Rhône from the 1180s until the river finally beat it in the 17th century, and across the water the French crown watched the popes from the towers of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.
The Revolution took the interiors. The palace was sacked in 1791, then used as a prison and from the early 1800s as a military engineers’ barracks — extra floors inserted, walls plastered, frescoes cut out and sold. The army left in 1906 and the building opened to the public in 1907. That history is why Avignon’s medieval rooms are bare stone rather than furnished apartments, and why the handful of surviving painted rooms matter as much as they do.
