Clement V was elected in 1305 and never entered Rome; the papal court settled at Avignon in 1309 and stayed for sixty-eight years. Benedict XII began the Palais Vieux in 1335 beside the cathedral — a blank-walled block around a cloister, austere on purpose. Clement VI, a Limousin aristocrat with different tastes, added the Palais Neuf from 1342. Together they make about 15,000 m² of floor, and the whole thing is built as a fortress: high curtain walls, machicolated towers, one defensible way in. Rome was ungovernable, mercenary companies roamed Provence, and after 1378 two rival popes claimed the office — the Avignon pope Benedict XIII was besieged inside this building in 1398.
Be ready for empty rooms. The palace was sacked in 1791, then served as a prison and from the early 1800s as a barracks for the military engineers, who inserted extra floors, plastered the walls, cut new windows and hacked frescoes off in saleable pieces. The prisons left in 1871, the army in 1906, and the public came in from 1907. There is no furniture, no treasury and no state apartment as anyone would recognise one.
What survived is the point, and it is all painting. In the Tour de la Garde-Robe, Clement VI’s private study — the Chambre du Cerf — was painted in 1343 by a Franco-Italian team with hunting, ferreting, fowling and fishing across every wall, a secular room in a papal palace. Two floors of the Tour Saint-Jean hold Matteo Giovannetti’s chapels: the Chapelle Saint-Martial above, painted between 13 October 1344 and 1 September 1345 and fully restored in 2014, and the Chapelle Saint-Jean below it, 1346–48. The Chambre du Pape of about 1337–38 keeps its blue ground of vines and oak leaves with birds and squirrels. In the Grande Audience, Giovannetti’s Prophets of 1353 runs twenty Old Testament figures across the vault. Photography is banned in all the painted rooms.
For scale, the route also takes in the Grande Chapelle, the Grand Tinel banqueting hall, the Cour d’Honneur and the terraces. Since 1 May 2026 the HistoPad tablet has gone: the palace now runs a free webapp, Les Clefs du Palais, on your own phone in six languages, with films and augmented-reality reconstructions promised from autumn 2026. Bring headphones and a charged battery.
