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While the Papacy continued subordinate to the French king, its moral influence in other parts of Christendom was of necessity reduced. Clement V, was crowned at Lyons in 1305, and in 1309 established himself at Avignon, a possession of the Holy See on the borders of France. It is the period in the annals of the Papacy which is called the "Babylonian captivity." Philip remained implacable.
It was here, as Gibbon tells us, that on the 15th of October, 1764, as he sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers, the idea of writing the 'Decline and Fall' of the city first started to his mind." The Vatican has been the residence of the Popes since their return from Avignon, in France, where they had resided from 1309 to 1377.
The trial of the Grand Master of the Knights Templars was held here in one of the halls of Chinon in 1309, and swift retribution was meted out to the members of the order, more for the love of gold than for the love of justice, as the Templars had become the bankers of Christendom and were possessed of vast treasures, which were seized upon forthwith.
When for nearly forty years Rome had been deserted by the popes, who had betaken themselves in 1309 to a long residence at Avignon, France, and when the Eternal City was virtually without an imperial government the Teutonic emperors having likewise abandoned her she fell back upon the memories of her great past, recalling the glories of her ancient supremacy and the means whereby it had been established and maintained.
It was made of silver, resembled a beautiful woman, and was, in fact, a reliquary containing the bones of one of the 11,000 virgins of Cologne. But truth was not wanted; and under the influence of solitary imprisonment, hunger, damp and loathsome dungeons, and two years of terror and misery, enough of confessions had been extorted for Philippe's purpose by the year 1309.
For their trial, Clement appointed a mixed commission including Winchelsea, Archbishop Greenfield of York, several English bishops, one French bishop, and certain papal inquisitors specially assigned for the purpose, the chief of whom were the Abbot of Lagny and Sicard de Lavaur, Canon of Narbonne, who came to England in 1309.
In the course of a trial between William de Birmingham, and the inhabitants of Bromsgrove and King's-norton, in 1309, concerning the right of tollage; it appeared, That the ANCESTORS of the said William had a market here before the Norman conquest. This proves, that the family of Birmingham were of Saxon race, and Lords of the Manor prior to that period.
This was not for culinary but for medicinal purposes, as it was then, and much later, employed as an ointment. Both William I. and his son the Red King maintained, as Warner shews us, a splendid table; and we have particulars of the princely scale on which an Abbot of Canterbury celebrated his installation in 1309.
It is the palace of the oldest Genoese family, and the statues in the façade represent the most famous members of the clan, as Oberto, the son of the founder of this branch of the race, the Luccoli Spinola, Conrado, who ruled the city in 1206, and Opizino, who married his daughter to Theodore Paleologus, Emperor of Constantinople, and lived like a king and was banished in 1309.
Towards evening the court stopped at Aversa, with a view to passing the night there, and since at that period there was no castle in the place worthy of entertaining the queen with her husband and numerous court, the convent of St. Peter's at Majella was converted into a royal residence: this convent had been built by Charles II in the year of our Lord 1309.
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