Pope Clement V was the first of the Avignon popes and the pontiff who, under pressure from King Philip IV of France, suppressed the Knights Templar at the Council of Vienne in 1312.
Pope Clement V (reigned 1305–1314) was a Gascon lawyer-pope who moved the papacy to Avignon and, bending to King Philip IV of France, dissolved the Order of the Temple.
Born Bertrand de Got in Gascony around 1264, he rose as a canon lawyer and archbishop of Bordeaux before his election as a compromise candidate in 1305, never setting foot in Rome.
Clement was an able canon lawyer but an irresolute and physically frail pope, chronically ill and heavily dependent on the goodwill of the king of France. Where a stronger pontiff might have resisted, he temporised.
His handling of the Templars shows the pattern. Pressed relentlessly by Philip IV — to whom he owed his position and who held the papacy in Avignon within reach of French power — Clement wavered, suspended the proceedings, examined the brothers at Chinon, and finally suppressed the order in 1312 by the administrative bull Vox in excelso, without a clear verdict of guilt.
He was not the villain of the affair so much as its weak point: a pope who let a king drive the destruction of an order, and whose reputation has never recovered from it. Contemporaries and historians alike remember him as pliant, ailing, and overmatched by the French crown.
After Philip IV’s mass arrest of the French Templars in 1307, Clement was drawn into a long, agonised process of inquiry. He tried at times to assert papal control, but in the end he yielded.
At the Council of Vienne in 1312 he dissolved the order and ordered its property transferred largely to the Hospitallers. Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master, was burned in 1314; Clement died the same year.
Worn down by illness, Clement died in Gascony in April 1314, only weeks after the burning of Jacques de Molay — the coincidence feeding the legend of de Molay’s dying curse.
Clement V is remembered as the pope who began the “Avignon Papacy” and who let the Templars fall. His reign marked a decisive shift of the papacy into the orbit of the French monarchy.
The suppression he oversaw scattered the Templar inheritance across Europe, giving rise to the Order of Christ in Portugal and the Order of Montesa in Aragon.