Philip IV crushes the Templars and moves the papacy to Avignon
A cash-strapped king breaks a crusading order and bends a pope to his will
Quick facts
- Location
- France and Avignon
- Key people
- Philip IV, Pope Boniface VIII, Pope Clement V
- Outcome
- Templars dissolved 1312; papacy in Avignon 1309-1377
What happened
King Philip IV of France, deeply in debt to the Knights Templar and locked in a power struggle with Pope Boniface VIII over royal taxation of the clergy, ordered the simultaneous arrest of every Templar in France on Friday, 13 October 1307, on charges of heresy and blasphemy. Boniface had asserted in his 1302 bull Unam Sanctam that spiritual authority stood above temporal rulers, a direct challenge Philip answered by having the pope briefly seized at Anagni; Boniface's successors proved more pliable, and in 1309 Pope Clement V, elected with Philip's backing, relocated the papal court to Avignon in southern France, where it remained for nearly seventy years. Clement formally dissolved the Templar order in 1312, and its last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in 1314.
Why it matters
Philip's actions demonstrated that a French king could destroy a wealthy international institution and effectively relocate the papacy, marking a decisive shift in power from the Church toward centralized royal states. The Avignon Papacy that followed, sometimes called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, weakened papal authority and helped set the stage for the later Western Schism.
How we know
The papal bull Unam Sanctam survives in its original Latin text and translation, directly documenting Boniface's claims that triggered the conflict, while later inquest records from the Templar trials, preserved in Vatican and French archives, detail the accusations and confessions extracted under interrogation.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Knights Templar · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, 1302 · Primary source (author-declared)sourcebooks.fordham.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
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