The Italian Poet Who Spent Forty Years Calling the Avignon Papacy a Babylonian Captivity

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) — known to English-language tradition as Petrarch — was one of the founding figures of European humanism, the rediscoverer of substantial portions of the lost Latin classical literary canon, and the substantial author of the Canzoniere sonnets that would define European lyric poetry for the next three centuries. He was also the most ferocious literary critic the Avignon papacy ever produced.

He had complicated standing. He had grown up in Avignon (his Florentine notary father had been exiled from Florence in 1302 and had followed the papal court to Avignon in 1311), had taken minor clerical orders in the Avignonese curia in 1326, and had received papal benefices and pensions from successive Avignon popes for the next forty years. He was,, an Avignonese curial insider.

He nonetheless spent those same forty years writing the most influential European polemical attacks on the Avignon papacy ever produced.

The Babylonian framing

Petrarch’s signature contribution was a phrase. He took the Old Testament image of the Israelites’ seventy-year exile to Babylon and applied it to the contemporary Avignon papacy: the Church had been exiled from its proper Roman seat to a corrupt foreign captivity, and the Avignon period was the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The phrase had been used by earlier authors (the Italian polemicist Marsilius of Padua had used something close to it in the 1320s) but Petrarch fixed it as the canonical European literary description of the Avignon period. Every subsequent European historiographic tradition — including the Protestant Reformation polemical tradition that would build on it 150 years later — inherited the framing.

The Petrarchan vehicle for the framing was the Liber sine nomine (‘Book Without Names’), a collection of nineteen polemical Latin letters Petrarch composed between approximately 1352 and 1361, identifying the recipients only by classical-allegorical pseudonyms in order to protect them from Avignonese reprisal. The letters circulated in manuscript through the European literary network and produced international pressure on the Avignon papacy from the 1360s onward.

Why he stayed

The paradox of Petrarch’s position was that he never left the Avignon curial system despite his sustained denunciation of it. The answer is partly practical and partly intellectual. The Avignonese papal pensions and benefices funded his scholarly and literary life through the entire Italian-Provençal period of his career — he could not have written the Canzoniere and the Africa and the classical-rediscovery work without the Avignonese institutional support. The intellectual circle around the Avignonese curia (the humanist canons of Provence, the Italian curial scholars resident in Avignon) was the most stimulating European intellectual community of the period; Petrarch was genuinely part of it.

His mature position was that the Avignonese papacy was institutionally corrupt and needed to return to Rome, but that the individual Avignonese clergymen he knew and worked with were individually decent men who could not be personally blamed for the institutional pathology. The framing has defined the subsequent European literary treatment of the Avignon period: condemnation of the institution, accommodation with the individuals.

What he saw

Petrarch was in Avignon during the 1347–1351 Black Death pandemic that swept the city under Pope Clement VI. His close friend Laura — the recipient of the Canzoniere sonnets — died of the plague at Avignon in April 1348. The subsequent Canzoniere poems were composed in the period of his mourning and shaped the European literary treatment of unconsummated love for the next three centuries.

He outlived four Avignon popes (Benedict XII, Clement VI, Innocent VI, Urban V) and lived to see the 1377 return of the papal court to Rome under Gregory XI — three years after his own death at Arquà in the Veneto. He died, appropriately, with his head on a book of Virgil that he had been reading the night before.

The Babylonian framing he had established outlived him by six and a half centuries. It still defines the popular European description of the Avignon papacy.