1301 Bishop Bernard Saisset of Pamiers (France) was arrested on suspicion of treason and heresy (pro-Cathar leanings). Fearing a trial before the Inquisition, Bernard appealed to the pope. Boniface demanded Bernard be tried in a church court. The claim that a pope had the right to hear a case involving treason against a secular ruler demaned justification – hence the bull Unum Sanctum issued in December of the following year.
1301 The Muslim governor of Egypt ordered all churches to be closed.
1302 Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) issued the bull Unum Sanctum, which elaborated on the Pope’s powers relative to those of the state and defined that salvation is not possible for anyone not under the power of the Roman pontiff:
“We are compelled, our faith urging us, to believe and to hold—and we do firmly believe and simply confess—that there is one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins; her Spouse proclaiming it in the canticles, "My dove, my undefiled is but one, she is the choice one of her that bore her"; which represents one mystical body, of which body the head is Christ, but of Christ, God.
1305 The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy (1304-76). Clement V (1305-14), a Frenchman, was elected pope, and remained in France. This was the beginning of the Avignon papacy.
1307 King Philip IV of France had all Templars in France arrested and their property seized. The Templars were accused of vice and sacrilege.
1308 The Turks first crossed into Europe.
1309 Pope Clement V (1305-14) settled in Avignon.
1309 Heavy rains in Europe led to widespread famine. Poor harvests and epidemics among the livestock were common through 1325.
1309 The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (the Knights Hospitallers) built a fortress on Rhodes after this year. Their fleet worked to keep the southern Mediterranean safe from the Turks. The Turks conquered the island in 1522.
1311 The Catalans (see 1303) siezed Athens from the Franks, then set up the Catalan Duchy of Athens and Thebes.
1311/12 Council of Vienne. One hundred and twenty bishops attended this council intended to try Pope Boniface VIII posthumously and to suppress the Knights Templar. (No trial of the late pope was held.) Pope Clement V (1305-14) canonized Pope Celestine V, whom Boniface had imprisoned. Representatives to the council from Aragon stated that 30,000 Christians were enslaved in Granada.
1312 The Order of the Knights Templar was suppressed in France. At a council held in Vienne, Clement V (1305-14) dissolved the mercenary order. The Templars’ goods outside France were transferred to the Orders of the Hospital.Clement also absolved Philip, king of France, of all blame in the matter of the attempted kidnapping of Boniface (see 1302) and the seizure of the Templars’ property (1307).
1317 In his bull Gloria Ecclesiam Pope John XXII (1316-34) condemned as heretics those who insisted on following the original rule of St. Francis of Assisi.
1321 Muslim authorities in Egypt had 60 churches destroyed, along with many monasteries.
1323 In his bull Cum inter nonullos, Pope John XXII (1316-34) condemned the doctrine of apostolic poverty as a heresy. This view was common among Franciscans. John was nicknamed ‘The Banker of Avignon.’ Historians estimate that John spent 63 percent of papal income on war.
1324 William of Occam (d. 1350), an English Franciscan friar, defended his philosophy at the bishop of Rome’s court in Avignon. Occam held that logic does not deal with being as such. In his view, propositions are purely forms of thought divested of ontological content, of any connection with ultimate reality. Ultimate truth cannot therefore be grasped intellectually. William opposed Pope John XXII's condemnation of the Franciscan teaching on poverty (1317). William argued that the case of Pope Joan proved that one could appear to be pope but be no pope at all. Other Franciscan theologian argued that earlier popes had taught that Christ was a pauper. Therefore, since John XXII contradicted these earlier popes, he was not pope at all.
1327-39 The Coptic Pope Benjamin II held office. During this period, Copts in Egypt were protected from persecution through the Ethiopian emperor’s threat to use force on their behalf.
1328 The Provincial Synod of Canterbury ordered the observance of the Feast of the Conception (of Mary). It did so because her conception was a significant event leading up to the Incarnation, not because of a belief in her Immaculate Conception.
1339 The Hundred Years War between England and France began. The English gained victories at Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) (where the king of France, John, was taken prisoner) though use of the longbow.
1339 Bubonic plague struck a Nestorian settlement near Lake Issyk Kul, in central Asia’s Ten Shan region.
1342 Clement VI (1342-52) became pope. He restored the largesse Benedict XII had restrained, passing favors through his lover, the Countess of Turenne. Clement was a patron to the poet Petrarch, who referred to him as an ‘ecclesiastical Dionysius ... soiled with incestuous embraces.’ Petrarch referred to Avignon as ‘the Babylon of the West.’
1345 The bubonic plague spread to Crimea.
1346 The bubonic plague reached the region of the Caucasus mountains.
1347 The bubonic plague reached Constantinople, Cyprus, Sicily, Venice, Florence, and Alexandria. By December, it had spread into Italy and France.
1348 The year of the Black Death. The plague reached Paris in the spring, and London in September. An estimated 35 to 40% of the people of the Mediterranean basin perished from the plague by 1350. Some historians believe the plague was even more severe in Central Asia – from about this time the flow of migration, which had formerly been from Central Asia westward into Europe, reversed. The argument is also made that the plague sufficiently depopulated the Ottoman Empire to prevent the Turks from colonizing the Balkans, thus leaving Europe comparatively free of Muslims.1348 After being tortured on the rack in Neustadt, Germany, Balovignus, a Jewish physician, confessed to having poisoned wells. Pogroms against the Jews in Europe followed. The kings of Castille and Aragon, and the pope in Avignon, tooks steps to protect the Jews, who were blamed for the outbreak of plague.
1349 The town council of Strasburg burned 2000 Jews (accused of causing the plague). Jews were also massacred in Frankfurt-am-Main, Cologne, and Mainz. Following these atrocities, many Jews emigrated eastward (see Casimir, 1346).
1349 In a bull issued on October 20, Pope Clement VI condemned flagellism. The flagellants organized processions in which they scourged themselves with leather whips to which small iron spikes were affixed. The flagellants were most numerous in Germany, where they blamed Jews for the plague and persecuted them.
1349 In November, John of Rupecissa finished his Liber secretum eventum, which predicted Christ would return to defeat the Antichrist in 1370, inaugurating the millennium. He set Judgment Day in the year 2370.
1369 Pestis Tertia. A third severe outbreak of plague in Europe: 10 to 15% of Europeans died.
1377In January, Pope Gregory XI (1370-78) moved the papacy back to Rome. The move was required to keep the papal properties in Italy from revolt, and was urged by Petrarch and Saint Catherine of Siena.
1378 The Great Schism (1378-1417). The Lateran Palace burned during the election of Urban VI (1378-89), an Italian, to the papacy. Fire was set by angry rioters. The mob made it clear to the assembled cardinals that they would have a Roman or Italian pope, not a French one. Later that year, after being insulted by Urban, the French cardinals met and elected Robert of Geneva, whose mercenaries had ravaged the town of Cesena, Pope Clement VII (1378-94). Thus began what is termed the ‘Great Schism.’ France, Flanders, Spain, and Scotland acknowledged Clement VII. The German Empire and England, with the northern and eastern nations and most of the Italian Republics, adhered to Urban VI.
1381 The Peasant’s Revolt in England in June and July of this year was triggered by the imposition of a tax of one shilling on everyone over 16 years of age. The peasants captured London and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury.
1381John Wyclif, an Oxford theologian, published his “Confession,” in which he denied that the substance of the bread and wine are transubstantiated in the mass. Wyclif rejected indulgences, auricular confession, extreme unction and holy orders. He took the Bible alone, without tradition as the sole rule of faith, and taught that the church was composed of the predestined only. A council meeting in London condemned his teachings in 1382. Wyclif died in 1384.
1387 The University of Paris condemned a Dominican who denied the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. It ordered all faculty members to accept it.
1391 In Spain, ant-Jewish preaching resulted in the massacre of roughly one-third of the Jews living there. Another third were forced to convert to Christianity.
1394 By the king’s order, the Jews were expelled from France (see 1290).
1396 Crusading armies under John of Burgundy and King Sigismund of Hungary were annihilated at Nicopolis by a Turkish force under the Sultan Bajazeth. This left Hungary open to invasion. Hungary was given respite when the Turks turned to attack the Romans and were later themselves beset by the Mongols.
