PALACE OF POPES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 May 1939, Page 6

PALACE OF POPES

ONE-TIME REFUGE AT AVIGNON. INTERESTING FRENCH RELIC. Avignon was once the refuge of a Pope who fled from Rome to escape hostile influence. This was in the year 1303. Benoit XI had just, breathed his last, and the Archbishop of Bordeaux was the favourite. But. Naples, Florence,.' Tuscany, Savoy, them so many little kingdoms, were all against the choosing of a Frenchman as Pope. Interminable discussion and quarrelling dragged on for eleven months, until Philip le Bel, King of France, invited the cardinals to Lyons, and there the Archbishop of Bordeaux was named Pope. During almost seventy years, from 1309 until 1377, Pope Clement V and his successors remained in France, but it was Clement V’s successor, John XXII, who was the first to inhabit with his suite the palace of the Popes at Avignon.

The Palace of the Popes, one of the largest complete buildings of the Middle Ages, stands empty today in all its 'majesty, visited every year by thousands, for it is one of the sights of the south of France. It is a curious building, so. much a fortress and so much a palace, characterised by battlemented walls and magnificent interior halls supported by tall pillars, and though these halls are empty there seems in them a curious presence, a grandeur of past splendour and ceremony. Huge halls occupy a great part of the interior, audience chambers, 60 yards long by 12 yards high, their size set off by the smallness of the doors leading up turrets to galleries and centry walks. Guard-rooms, cells, halls where the army of attendants took their meals, go to make up this magnificent building with'its seven towers covering over three acres of ground' and built around quadrangulai' courts. Its stones are yellow and mellowed with age, and with its wide surfaces of masonry the Palace of the Popes is one of the most beautiful old buildings in existence.