9 - The Suppression

Summary

Clement V opened the first session of his great ecumenical council with a sermon in the cathedral at Vienne on Saturday 16 October 1311. The assembled clergy were to consider the three great matters of the Order of the Temple, aid to the Holy Land, and reform of the Church. Injunctions to attend had been sent out to at least 161 prelates, apart from the clergy of the papal Curia itself and the suffragans of these prelates. Representatives were to come from all over Christendom, from Italy, France, the Empire, the Iberian peninsula, the British Isles, Scandinavia and eastern Europe, as well as the four great patriarchs of the Church after the pope. The council was to be truly universal, for it encompassed the Irish sees in the west at one extreme, and the archbishopric of Riga in the east at the other. The great princes had been invited: the king of the Romans, and the kings of France, England and the Iberian peninsula, as well as the kings of Sicily, Hungary, Bohemia, Cyprus and Scandinavia. But even as the official opening was completed and the blessing given to the congregation, the project was already turning sour. More than a third of the prelates did not come in person, a contemporary placing the number at 114. No kings appeared except for Philip the Fair, who did not come until the following spring, and who was in attendance not to participate in the work of reform, but to pressurise the pope on the specific issue of the Templars.