Avignon des Papes (May 2018)

If you need to tell off somebody nicely, you might do worse than to quote King Phillip of France, who told Pope Boniface VIIII in 1302 in response to the papal bull 'Unam Sanctum' by which that pope tried to state the primacy of the pope in all worldly matters. King Phillip is reported to have replied:

"Your venerable conceitedness may know that we are nobody's vassal in temporary matters."

The rest, they say, is history - but 7 (French) popes chose Avignon as the seat of the Catholic Church, under the close control of the French court, leaving architectural and cultural legacies for the motorcycling traveller to marvel at.

Wikipedia and others do a good job of filling in the details ...

'During its time in Avignon, the papacy adopted many features of the Royal court: the life-style of its cardinals was more reminiscent of princes than clerics; more and more French cardinals, often relatives of the ruling pope, took key positions; and the proximity of French troops was a constant reminder of where secular power lay, with the memory of Pope Boniface VIII still fresh.’
(Source: Wikipedia)

The period has been called the "Babylonian captivity" of the popes. When and where this term originated is uncertain although it may have sprung from Petrarch, who in a letter to a friend (1340–1353) written during his stay at Avignon, described Avignon of that time as the "Babylon of the west," referring to the worldly practices of the church hierarchy.[11] The nickname is polemical, in referring to the claim by critics that the prosperity of the church at that time was accompanied by a profound compromise of the papacy's spiritual integrity, especially in the alleged subordination of the powers of the Church to the ambitions of the French kings. As noted, the "captivity" of the popes at Avignon lasted about the same amount of time as the exile of the Jews in Babylon, making the analogy convenient and rhetorically potent. The Avignon papacy has been and is often today depicted as being totally dependent on the French kings, and sometimes as even being treacherous to its spiritual role and its heritage in Rome.

Almost a century and a half later, Protestant reformer Martin Luther wrote his treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), but he claimed it had nothing to do with the Western Schism or papacy in Avignon.