Avignon 🇫🇷 The Piece of Rome That Sat Inside France for 500 Years

Avignon 🇫🇷 The Piece of Rome That Sat Inside France for 500 Years

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 33

For seventy years, this French town was the capital of the Catholic Church — and Rome could do nothing about it. Seven popes ruled Christianity from the largest Gothic palace ever built. And here’s what almost no one realises: Avignon wasn’t even part of France. It belonged to the Church for nearly five hundred years. It only became French in 1791, when a revolution finally absorbed the piece of Rome sitting inside it.
In 1309, Pope Clement V — a Frenchman born in Gascony — refused to go to Rome. The city was violent, riven by feuding aristocratic families, and the papal palace on the Lateran had recently burned down. Clement settled in Avignon, which at the time belonged to the Papacy’s vassals, the Angevin Kings of Naples. What was meant to be temporary lasted seventy years. Seven successive popes governed the Catholic Church from Avignon between 1309 and 1376 — a period historians call the Avignon Papacy, or less charitably, the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.
The Palais des Papes is the physical proof of how permanent “temporary” became. It is the largest Gothic palace ever constructed — 15,000 square metres of fortified stone, with walls three metres thick, towers rising over fifty metres, and a great chapel large enough to hold thousands. Pope Benedict XII began building it in 1335. Pope Clement VI expanded it into something closer to a royal court than a monastery — commissioning frescoes by the Italian painter Matteo Giovannetti, importing wines from Burgundy, and hosting banquets that scandalised the rest of Europe. Petrarch, who lived in Avignon during this period, called the papal court a place of corruption and excess. He wasn’t entirely wrong. He wasn’t entirely fair either.
In 1348, Pope Clement VI purchased the city of Avignon outright from Queen Joanna I of Naples for 80,000 florins. From that moment, Avignon was papal territory — sovereign, independent, answering to Rome and no French king. The popes returned to Rome in 1376, but Avignon didn’t return to France. The city and the surrounding Comtat Venaissin remained a papal enclave inside French territory for another four centuries. French kings ruled on every side. Avignon answered to Rome. It was a foreign country the size of a county, sitting in the middle of Provence.
The Pont Saint-Bénézet — the bridge of the famous children’s song — originally stretched across the Rhône with twenty-two stone arches. The river kept flooding and destroying sections. After one collapse too many in the 17th century, the people of Avignon simply stopped rebuilding it. Four arches remain, ending abruptly over the water. A bridge to nowhere that became one of the most visited monuments in France. Avignon keeps what time breaks. It doesn’t pretend the damage away.
In 1791, during the French Revolution, France held a vote in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin and formally annexed the papal territories. After 481 years, the piece of Rome sitting inside France was finally absorbed. The Pope protested. France didn’t care. The Revolution had larger concerns than a medieval property deed.
Every July, the Festival d’Avignon transforms the city into one of the largest performing arts festivals on Earth — the palace courtyard becomes a two-thousand-seat open-air theatre, and stages appear in every square, church and alley. A city built to be the centre of the Christian world never forgot how to hold an audience.
Seven popes. One palace. Five centuries of not being French. A bridge that goes nowhere. And a city that kept every broken thing because it understood that damage is just another kind of history.

🗺️ GoBeyondia Atlas — Mediterranean Region
🌐 https://GoBeyondia.com

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