Pope Clement VI (1342-1352)

The pope who defined the treasury of merits

Before Clement VI, the practice of indulgences existed, but its theological justification remained vague. With the bull Unigenitus Dei Filius of 27 January 1343, a pope for the first time in magisterial form articulated the doctrine of the "treasury of the Church": the infinite merits of Christ, augmented by the surplus merits of the Virgin and the saints, form a spiritual treasury that the successor of Peter can dispense to the faithful.^[11][12] This is the doctrinal foundation of indulgences and the Jubilee. That this decisive definition came from a pope otherwise criticized for his worldliness is one of the great paradoxes in Church history.

The pope who bought Avignon

Since Clement V, the papacy had resided in Avignon without owning it: the city belonged to the Counts of Provence, that is, the House of Anjou of Naples. On 9 June 1348, Clement VI purchased Avignon from Queen Joanna I of Naples for 80,000 gold florins.^[13][14] From then on, the pope was at home on the banks of the Rhône. The purchase cemented the Avignon papacy’s roots and made the papal court more independent — but it also made the "temporary" stay more permanent, and pushed back the return to Rome.

The pope who protected the Jews during the Plague

In 1348-1349, the Black Death ravaged Europe and unleashed delirious accusations against the Jews: they were accused of poisoning wells, and entire communities were massacred. Clement VI responded with two bulls that condemned the massacres, forbade forced conversions, threatened excommunication for persecutors, and dismantled the accusation with common sense: the plague struck regions without Jews as well, and Jews died as Christians did.^[15][16] This is one of the finest moral gestures of the medieval papacy, and it came from a pope reputed to be frivolous.

A Family of the Lesser Limousin Nobility

Pierre Roger was born around 1290-1291 at the Château de Maumont, in the parish of Rosiers-d'Égletons, in the heart of Lower Limousin, into a family of minor aristocracy.^[17][18] Nothing in this modest origin destined him for the tiara: it was through intellectual merit, not birth, that he rose — a trait that distinguishes this pontiff from many feudal prelates of his time.

The Monk of La Chaise-Dieu

At the age of ten, the boy was entrusted to the Benedictines of the abbey of La Chaise-Dieu, in Auvergne, where he took monastic vows.^[19][20] This monastic connection marked him throughout his life: it was in this abbey, not in Rome or Avignon, that he wished to be laid to rest. La Chaise-Dieu is not a mere biographical detail: it is the spiritual matrix of a man whose career was anything but monastic.

The Theologian of Paris

Sent to the University of Paris, Pierre Roger studied there for about fifteen years and gained a great reputation. He became a master of theology in 1323, then provisor of the Sorbonne college.^[21][22] This is a crucial point: unlike Clement V, who was a jurist, Clement VI was a theologian by training, a renowned orator whose several sermons have been preserved. This doctrinal expertise explains the authority with which he would define, as pope, the treasury of merits.^[23]

A Meteoric Rise: Arras, Sens, Rouen

Pierre Roger’s career was one of the fastest of the century. Abbot of Fécamp, he was appointed bishop of Arras on 3 December 1328, and became the same year chancellor of France in the service of King Philip VI of Valois.^[24][25] He then moved to the archiepiscopal see of Sens (24 November 1329), then to that of Rouen (14 December 1330) — the richest in the French Church. A man of court as much as of the Church, he was one of the most listened-to advisors of the Capetian crown.

The Cardinal of 1338

On 15 December 1338, Pope Benedict XII created him cardinal-priest of the title of Saints Nereus and Achilleus.^[26][27] The Limousin theologian thus entered the Sacred College at the height of his reputation. At Benedict XII’s death in April 1342, he appeared as the natural candidate: eloquent, diplomatic, close to France, and skilled enough to rally all factions.

A Swift and Unanimous Election

Unlike the interminable conclaves of the century, the election of 1342 was quick. Pierre Roger was elected on 7 May 1342, and crowned on 19 May at the Dominican convent in Avignon, taking the name Clement VI.^[28][29] The choice of a French theologian, former chancellor of the kingdom, confirmed the French orientation of the Avignon papacy.

A Reversal of Style after Benedict XII

The contrast with his predecessor was striking. Benedict XII, an austere Cistercian, had led a sober and reforming court. Clement VI, by contrast, threw wide open the doors of luxury: sumptuous banquets, lavish generosity, patronage of artists and scholars.^[30][31] Tradition attributes to him a saying that sums up his temperament as a generous prince: reportedly, no visitor was to leave his presence dissatisfied — a formula reported by chroniclers and echoed by historians of the Avignon court, cited here in paraphrase for lack of a recovered exact source.^[32]

This ostentatious generosity, which earned him the nickname “the Magnificent”, was also the source of his harshest criticisms: crushing taxation, sale of benefices, nepotism. The theologian pope was a poor manager of finances and public opinion.

The “Palais Neuf” of Avignon

It was under Clement VI that Avignon became a true princely capital. From 1342 onward, the pope had the “Palais Neuf” built, which complemented Benedict XII’s austere palace and gave the Palais des Papes its monumental silhouette.^[33][34] Papal accounts reveal the scale of the effort: a considerable portion of expenses went into construction and decoration.

Matteo Giovannetti and the Frescoes

To adorn his apartments, Clement VI called upon the painter Matteo Giovannetti, from Viterbo, who covered with frescoes the chapel of Saint Martial, the chapel of Saint John, and the famous “Stag Chamber”, a masterpiece of 14th-century court painting.^[35] Avignon attracted poets, jurists, musicians, and scholars: the papal court became one of Europe’s great cultural centers.

Avignon, the “Babylon of the West”

This splendor had its downside. Petrarch, who lived in Avignon, left behind pages of unprecedented severity against the papal court, denouncing a new Babylon, a cesspool of all vices. In substance — a paraphrase of the motif, not a literal quotation, no exact French wording having been recovered from the source —: Avignon is depicted there as the disgrace of nations, the most impious of cities, where there would be neither piety, nor charity, nor faith.^[36]

One must allow for polemical exaggeration: Petrarch had personal grievances, and the Avignon court was not only a place of vice. But the picture sufficiently conveys the worldly reputation that Clement VI’s pontificate fixed upon the Avignon papacy.^[37]

A City That Did Not Belong to the Pope

As long as the popes resided in Avignon, they were in reality guests there. The city belonged to the County of Provence, a fief of the Angevin house of Naples; the Comtat Venaissin, around Carpentras, on the other hand, had already belonged to the Holy See since the 13th century.^[38][39] This situation made the pope a spiritual sovereign residing on land that was not his own.

80,000 Florins to Queen Joanna

On June 9, 1348, Clement VI purchased full sovereignty over Avignon from Joanna I, Queen of Naples and Countess of Provence, for 80,000 gold florins.^[40][41] This transaction has been interpreted as linked to the queen’s difficult situation, accused of murdering her husband Andrew of Hungary and temporarily taking refuge in Provence; but the purchase primarily reflects a long-term strategy. From then on, and until the French Revolution, Avignon would be papal territory.

The Meaning of the Operation

Buying Avignon did not mean legally renouncing Rome; it was a practical acknowledgment that the Rhone residence would endure. The act consolidated the papal court, taxation, and administration, but it prolonged the estrangement from Rome—an estrangement that would not end until 1377, and whose price would be the Great Western Schism.^[42]

The Plague of 1348

In 1348, the Black Death struck Avignon and caused devastation: according to chroniclers, nearly a quarter of the papal court perished.^[43] Clement VI did not flee. Following the advice of his physician Guy de Chauliac, he barricaded himself in, kept large fires burning, but remained in the city and organized relief efforts.

Against the Accusation of Poisoning the Wells

Panic sought scapegoats. Throughout Europe, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and spreading the plague; entire communities were burned. Against this madness, Clement VI took a rare and clear stand. His bull Quamvis perfidiam of September 26, 1348—preceded by an initial protective act in early July 1348—forbade killing, injuring, or robbing Jews, threatened persecutors with excommunication, and refuted the accusation with reason:

“Since the plague also rages in places where no Jew dwells, and strikes Jews themselves as well as other peoples, it is false and impious to attribute its cause to them.”
— From the bull Quamvis perfidiam of Clement VI, September 26, 1348^[44]

The Scope and Limits of the Gesture

Papal protection was not enough to stop massacres everywhere, especially in the Empire, where papal authority was weak.^[45][46] But the act retains considerable moral and doctrinal value: a pope opposed reason and charity to murderous superstition, reaffirming the Church’s traditional protection of the Jews, in continuity with the Sicut Judaeis. Avignon also became a lasting refuge for the “Jews of the pope.”^[47]

Shortening the Jubilee Interval

The first great jubilee had been proclaimed by Boniface VIII in 1300, with a periodicity of one century. In response to the faithful’s expectations, Clement VI decided to reduce the interval to fifty years and proclaimed the jubilee of 1350.^[48][49] The pope did not go to Rome himself but sent legates there: despite the recent plague, the influx of pilgrims was immense.

Unigenitus Dei Filius: The Treasury of Merits

To doctrinally ground the plenary indulgence of this jubilee, Clement VI promulgated the bull Unigenitus Dei Filius on January 27, 1343.^[50][51] The text states that Christ, by His sacrifice, established for the Church a treasury—thesaurus—of infinite merits, to which are added the superabundant merits of the Virgin and the saints, and that this treasury is entrusted to Peter and his successors to be dispensed to the faithful. The bull contains a theologically profound formula on the infinite value of Christ’s blood:

“A single drop of His blood, because of His union with the Word, would have sufficed to redeem all mankind.”
— Clement VI, bull Unigenitus Dei Filius, January 27, 1343^[52]

A Definition Recalled Against Luther

This definition is not a mere scholarly detail. Nearly two centuries later, when Martin Luther denied, in his theses 56 to 58, that “the treasury of the Church from which the pope draws indulgences” was constituted by the merits of Christ and the saints, it was the doctrine of Unigenitus Dei Filius that the magisterium opposed to him: as early as October 1518, at Augsburg, Cardinal Cajetan demanded of Luther a retraction on this precise point (thesis 58), and then the bull Exsurge Domine of Leo X (1520) condemned the Lutheran error on this point.^[53][54][55] The worldly pope of 1343 had, unknowingly, armed the Church against the Reformation.

The Conflict with Louis IV of Bavaria

Like his Avignon predecessors, Clement VI inherited the long-standing conflict between the papacy and Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria, who had been excommunicated for a long time. The pope maintained a firm stance against the emperor and supported a rival candidacy for the imperial throne.^[56][57] The accidental death of Louis, during a bear hunt near Munich on October 11, 1347, resolved the crisis.

Charles IV of Luxembourg, the Pope’s Candidate

Clement VI had his former pupil Charles IV of Luxembourg elected King of the Romans on July 11, 1346, against Louis.^[58][59] This maneuver illustrated the political weight of the Avignon papacy in imperial affairs — but also its dependence on French interests, since Charles was close to the French court.

Cola di Rienzo and the Roman Dream

In Rome itself, the adventure of Cola di Rienzo, who proclaimed himself tribune and dreamed of restoring ancient grandeur, intersected with papal politics: Clement VI initially supported him, then condemned and excommunicated him when his power became excessive.^[60] This episode shows how much the Eternal City, delivered to anarchy in the pope’s absence, called for a return that Clement VI never made.

The Crusade of Smyrna (1344)

Clement VI did not forget the defense of Christendom against the advancing Turks. He promoted a naval league which, on October 28, 1344, captured the port of Smyrna, one of the few Christian successes in the East in the 14th century.^[61][62] The pope also supported projects for union with the Armenians and Eastern Christians.

Arbiter of the Hundred Years’ War

At the heart of the Hundred Years’ War, the French pope sought to mediate between Philip VI and Edward III of England, and helped bring about the Truce of Malestroit (1343).^[63] But his French origin and sympathies made his mediation suspect in English eyes, and his interventions in favor of papal reserved benefices provoked resistance in England that culminated in the Statute of Provisors of 1351.^[64]

The Canonization of Saint Yves and the Condemnation of the Flagellants

Church governance was also a focus of the pontificate. In 1347, Clement VI canonized Yves of Tréguier (Yves Hélory de Kermartin), the Breton priest-lawyer and future patron saint of lawyers.^[65] And when the plague gave rise to the fervent movement of the flagellants, who roamed Europe whipping themselves and claiming to dispense with the Church, the pope condemned them by the bull Inter sollicitudines on October 20, 1349.^[66] The theologian knew how to distinguish true penance from collective fanaticism.

The great sin of Clement VI’s governance was nepotism. Of the twenty-five cardinals he created, about a dozen were his relatives; he showered his family with benefices, lands, and dignities.^[67][68] His own nephew, Pierre Roger de Beaufort, would become pope under the name Gregory XI — the very pope who, in 1377, finally returned the papacy to Rome. Clement VI’s nepotism, a real fault, was never a sin against the faith: it affected discipline and governance, not doctrine.

This is the profound meaning of this pontificate, and the point rightly emphasized by Catholic apologetics. Clement VI combined personal faults: love of luxury, lavish generosity, heavy taxation, nepotism, and distance from Rome. Yet, no erroneous doctrinal definition emerged from his pontificate — on the contrary, he gave the Church a magisterial enunciation later used against Luther, and he acted with moral courage when Europe descended into anti-Jewish hatred.^[69][70]

The objection that a pope’s unworthiness would undermine the Church’s authority meets here a textbook case. The personal holiness of the pope is not the condition of the truth he teaches; the assistance of the Holy Spirit guarantees the office, that is, the faithful transmission of the faith, not the moral perfection of the man.^[71] A pope may be worldly, spendthrift, and surrounded by nephews without this touching in the slightest the revealed deposit — just as Clement V could yield to the King of France on form without defining anything false in substance.

The Death of December 6, 1352

Clement VI died in Avignon on December 6, 1352, after a brief illness.^[72][73] Faithful to his original abbey, he had requested to be laid to rest not in Avignon, but at La Chaise-Dieu, where he had magnificently rebuilt the abbey church. His body was transferred there in the spring of 1353.

The Desecrated Tomb

His marble tomb, topped with his effigy crowned with the tiara, was one of the finest funerary monuments of the Gothic period. But, like that of Clement V at Uzeste, it was desecrated by the Protestants during the Wars of Religion in 1562: the Huguenots destroyed the monument and burned the pope’s remains.^[74] The abbey church of La Chaise-Dieu still preserves the restored recumbent statue and the famous Dance of Death fresco.

The Black Legend and History

Historiography long reduced Clement VI to a caricature: the pleasure-seeking, extravagant, nepotistic pope of Avignon’s “Babylon.” Modern scholarship, notably the works of Diana Wood and Bernard Guillemain, has restored a more accurate portrait: that of a leading theologian, a cultured ruler whose faults were real but whose doctrinal work and moral courage were equally genuine.^[75][76]

The pontificate of Clement VI offers a lesson the Church has continually reflected upon. A pope can be worldly without being heretical, extravagant without being unfaithful, criticized in his lifetime yet useful for centuries. His great doctrinal bull, issued amid the splendor of Avignon, has become a reference magisterial enunciation on the treasury of merits and indulgences, included in Denzinger. His action in favor of the Jews, taken amid widespread panic, remains a pinnacle of the Church’s reasonable charity.

The Avignon Papacy was therefore not merely a “captivity”: it was also a time of doctrinal and administrative construction. Clement the Magnificent, with his striking contradictions, is its most representative figure — a man both weak and brilliant, through whom the office of Peter continued to teach without error.

• Pope Benedict XII (1334-1342) — the austere Cistercian predecessor whose style Clement VI overturned.
• Pope Clement V (1305-1314) — the first Avignon pope, another example of a weak pope with a preserved office.
• The Avignon Papacy (1309-1377) — the comprehensive dossier on the seven popes of the Rhône.
• Purgatory and Indulgences — the doctrine of the Treasury of Merits defined by Unigenitus Dei Filius.
• The Great Western Schism (1378-1417) — the crisis born from the long absence from Rome.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) — whose theses on indulgences were condemned in the name of Clement VI’s bull.

Ignispedia article — category Church History, series “The Popes.” Sources: Holy See, Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), Encyclopædia Britannica, Enciclopedia dei Papi (Treccani), Diana Wood (Cambridge, 1989), Bernard Guillemain (1962), Guillaume Mollat (1965), Shlomo Simonsohn (PIMS), bulls Unigenitus Dei Filius and Quamvis perfidiam, Denzinger-Hünermann.