In 1309 the papal court moved from Rome to Avignon — a city on the edge of French influence — and stayed for nearly seventy years. Formally nothing had collapsed: the pope was still pope, Masses were sung, councils met. But imperceptibly the see of the Apostle Peter came to look too much like an appendage of French policy, and like a well-oiled machine for collecting money from the whole of Christendom — for offices, for dispensations, for absolutions. Spiritual authority, called to stand above earthly crowns, fused ever more tightly with one particular crown and with money. The idol was the power of the see itself — the influence and the income for which its independence could be bartered away.
The reckoning for this worldliness came in 1378, in the form of a schism absurd beyond precedent. After the papacy's return to Rome, a group of cardinals, unhappy with the pope who had been elected, declared the election void and chose another, who took his seat at Avignon. Christendom now had two popes at once, each anathematizing the other and all his followers. And when a council gathered at Pisa tried to depose both and elect a third, there were three popes — all three excommunicating one another. The believer no longer knew whose blessing held good, or which of the three was the vicar of Christ.
The captivity of this schism was not geographical but inward. Latin Christendom split not over faith but along political camps: kingdoms and orders chose "their" pope by the arithmetic of alliances, and the man at prayer became a hostage of diplomacy. The very authority of Rome — the invisible support on which the obedience of the Western Church rested — was undermined in the sight of all. When three men in succession each call themselves the sole successor of Peter, the word "sole" itself loses its force, and a question settles into the soul: does this supreme authority exist at all?
The way out was found at Constance, at a great council of the Church, which deposed all the claimants and in 1417 elected a single pope, Martin V. The schism was healed, but the price of the return proved double-edged. Unity was restored not by the authority of the pope but by the authority of the council — and this exalted the conciliar idea: the thought that the last support of truth is not one man but the assembly of the Church. Above all, the battered authority of Rome never climbed back to its former height. A century later, when a monk in Wittenberg questioned the pope's right to sell forgiveness, he found the soil already loosened: the Avignon captivity and the schism had prepared the ground for the Reformation.