“Topography, Identity, Politics, and The Vacant See in Schismatic Avignon”
Joëlle Rollo-Koster

The Vacant See (sede vacante) was an institutional form enacted at the death of a pope; it took over the temporal regime of the Church left void by the pope’s death until the election of his successor.  It gave prominence to the Apostolic Chamber for the temporal rule of the church and to its Chamberlain for funerary liturgical functions.  It employed special laws, customs, symbolism, and even a currency.  With the exception of Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, historians have up-to-now focused only on its Roman occurrences from the early modern period on.  This paper identifies its deployment in Avignon, during the Schism’s subtraction of obedience (1398-1403, when Benedict XIII’s cardinals and France withdrew their support from “their” pope to compel him to resign).

The events that befell late fourteenth century Avignon suggest that political contests emerging from the interregnum’s power vacuum were made discernible through symbolic or actual manipulations or alterations of Avignon’s topography.  The political confusion created by the subtraction facilitated a re-orchestration of Avignon’s urban landscape.  France’s subtraction unleashed a topographic power struggle. While defenders of “anti-pope” Benedict XIII favored the old town, the papal palace and its surroundings—the focus until then of the city’s actual and symbolic life—his various enemies withdrew deference by bounding themselves to the spaces and constituencies of Avignon’s periphery, the new fourteenth-century town.  Doing so, Benedict’s enemies inverted the cultural topography of the city; they moved forward the area situated between old and new walls and “marginalized” the old town and the papal palace.  This paper will offer a variety of evidence concerning the political spatial appropriation of Avignon: occupation or construction of buildings but also spatial appropriation as defined by visions and miracles.