sessions of the military order, declared heretical under pressure from Philip the Fair, passed to the Hospitallers, not into the hands of the French crown. But Clement V, John XXII ( 1316-34), and Benedict XII ( 1334-42) were not northern Frenchmen by origin. They came from the south of France: Clement was a Gascon, John was from Cahors, Benedict from Pamiers--all with connections among the southern French nobility rather than the court circle of northern France. The fact that there was no major Anglo-French conflict between 1303 and 1324 and 1326 and 1337 can partly be attributed to the vigilance of the Avignon popes, who dispatched mediators and legates to areas which they knew and (in Clement's case) loved well to appease feuds and reconcile disputes. It was under Clement VI ( 1342-52), formerly archbishop of Rouen and counsellor of Philip VI of France, that French interests began to dominate papal policy. Under Urban V ( 1362-70) very substantial concessions were made, especially in matters of finance, to the French crown at a time when it most needed papal support. By sanctioning the marriage of Philip the Bold and Margaret of Flanders, for example, in 1369 rather than giving a dispensation to one of Edward III's sons to marry her, Urban demonstrated to the English that the papacy was a partisan of Charles V of France. There was little respect for the French papacy, for political reasons, in many parts of Christendom.
The papal return to Rome under Gregory XI in 1378 brought no solution to the Church's problems. A body of cardinals opposed to the move from Avignon elected a rival pope and the western Church entered a period of schism which was to last until 1417. During that time various attempts were made to resolve the problems which had caused it, but it was left to a council of the Church to agree upon the election of Pope Martin V and to depose his rivals. The Conciliar Movement produced an important body of political theory and was to some extent an expression of a more general movement towards representative government in Europe as a whole. Conciliar theory, propounded at Pisa ( 1409), Constance ( 1414-17), and Basle ( 1431-49), was to influence later re-
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