5 o6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE pope and then the choice of the cardinals fell upon Philip's candidate, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who became Clement V (1305-1314). Instead of taking up his residence at Rome, Clement was crowned at Lyons, a city which six years later became French territory, and in 1309 he came to Avignon on the Rhone, where the popes were to live for nearly seventy years. They purchased the town from the Count of Provence and ruled it as an independent prin- cipality. It was not annexed to France until 1791. But Provence was under the rule of a French line, the House of Anjou, and the popes at Avignon were near enough to the French boundary to be under French influence, just as Clement himself was a tool of Philip, although the city of Bordeaux of which he had been archbishop belonged to England. Clement named many new cardinals, among them sixteen from his native Gascony and four of his own family, so that the Italians and the sympathizers with Boni- face were outnumbered in the college of cardinals. Also Clement and Philip together despoiled the French clergy, giving all the choice positions in the French churches to their own favorites. Finally the pope even freed Nogaret from excommunication, restored to the Colonna family its two cardinalates, and abolished the Order of Knights Templars at Philip's suggestion. Philip owed the Templars a deal of money and coveted their property to help pay for his expensive wars. The Fall of the Knights had grown wealthy and powerful and had become rather unpopular. Accordingly Philip had all those in France arrested and examined by inquisitors. A number of shocking charges of idolatry, irrcligion, and immorality were trumped up against them. The use of torture was required to procure confessions in France, and those who confessed to such acts often declared afterwards that they had spoken falsehoods under pain or of torture. In other lands like England and Spain the iplars were not proved guilty. So they seem to have been unjustly condemned in France and Philip to have been responsible for this. Many died under torture, others
